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Robert Louis Stevenson 
From a photograph by Lloyd Osbourne 



THE LIFE OF 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

FOR BOYS AND GIRLS 



BY 

JACQUELINE M. OVERTON 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1915 



Copyright, i 91 5, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

Published August, 1915 







©Cl.A4.i0269 

AUG 31 18:5 






TO THE BOYS AT THE YORKVILLE LIBRARY 

AND 

TO ALL OTHER BOYS 

WHO LOVE TO TRAMP AND CAMP AND SEEK ADVENTURE 

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 

WITH THE HOPE OF MAKING THEM 

BETTER FRIENDS WITH A MAN WHO ALSO 

LOVED THESE THINGS 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Lighthouse Builders 3 

II. Robert Louis Stevenson 16 

III. The Lantern Bearer 31 

IV. Edinburgh Days 47 

V. Amateur Emigrant 72 

VI. Scotland Again 93 

VII. Second Visit to America 108 

VIII. In the South Seas 121 

IX. Vailima 148 

Bibliography 175 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Robert Louis Stevenson Frontispiece 

From a photograph by Mr. Lloyd Osbourne 

FACING 
PACE 

No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Stevenson's 
birthplace 18 

Colinton Manse 26 

Swanston Cottage 42 

Edinburgh Castle 64 

Skerryvore Cottage, Bournemouth 98 

The Treasure Island map 100 

Facsimile of letter sent to Cummy with "An 
Inland Voyage" 106 

Bas-relief of Stevenson by Augustus Saint Gaudens 112 

South Sea houses 130 

The house at Vailima 154 

A feast of chiefs 162 

The tomb of Stevenson on Vaea Mountain . . . 172 



THE LIFE OF 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

FOR BOYS AND GIRLS 



"Write me as one who loves his fellowmen." 

— Hunt. 



CHAPTER I 
THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 

"... For the sake 
Of these, my kinsmen and my countrymen, 
Who early and late in the windy ocean toiled 
To plant a star for seamen." 

THE pirate, Ralph the Rover, so legend 
tells, while cruising off the coast of 
Scotland searching for booty or sport, sank 
the warning bell on one of the great rocks, 
to plague the good Abbot of Arbroath who 
had put it there. The following year the 
Rover returned and perished himself on the 
same rock. 

In the life of one of Scotland's great men, 
Robert Louis Stevenson, we find proud 
record of his grandfather, Robert Steven- 
son, having built Bell Rock Lighthouse on 
this same spot years afterward. 

No story of Robert Louis Stevenson's life 
would be complete that failed to mention 
3 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

the work done for Scotland and the world 
at large by the two men he held most dear, 
the engineers, his father and grandfather. 

When Robert Stevenson, his grandfather, 
received his appointment on the Board of 
Northern Lights the art of lighthouse build- 
ing in Scotland had just begun. Its bleak, 
rocky shores were world-famous for their 
danger, and few mariners cared to venture 
around them. At that time the coast "was 
lighted at a single point, the Isle of May, 
in the jaws of the Firth of Forth, where, on 
a tower already a hundred and fifty years 
old, an open coal-fire blazed in an open 
chaufer. The whole archipelago thus nightly 
plunged in darkness was shunned by sea- 
going vessels." * 

The board at first proposed building four 
new lights, but afterward built many more, 
so that to-day Scotland stands foremost 
among the nations for the number and splen- 
dor of her coast lights. 

Their construction in those early days 

* Stevenson, " Family of Engineers." 
4 



THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 

meant working against tremendous obstacles 
and dangers, and the life of the engineer was 
a hazardous one. 

"The seas into which his labors carried 
him were still scarce charted, the coasts still 
dark; his way on shore was often far be- 
yond the convenience of any road; the isles 
in which he must sojourn were still partly 
savage. He must toss much in boats; he 
must often adventure much on horseback by 
dubious bridle-track through unfrequented 
wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his 
lighthouses in the very camp of wreckers. 

"The aid of steam was not yet. At first 
in random coasting sloop, and afterwards in 
the cutter belonging to the service, the en- 
gineer must ply and run amongst these mul- 
tiplied dangers and sometimes late into the 
stormy autumn." 

All of which failed to daunt Robert Steven- 
son who loved action and adventure and the 
scent of things romantic. 

"Not only had towers to be built and ap- 
paratus transplanted, the supply of oil must 
5 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

be maintained and tlie men fed, in the sahie 
inaccessible and distant scenes, a whole 
service with its routine . . . had to be 
called out of nothing; and a new trade (that 
of light-keeper) to be taught, recruited and 
organized." 

Bell Rock was only one of twenty light- 
houses Robert Stevenson helped to build, but 
it was by far the most difficult one . . . and 
even to-day, after it has been lighted for 
more than a hundred years, it still remains 
unique — a monument to his skill. 

Bell Rock was practically a reef completely 
submerged at full tide and only a few feet of 
its crest visible at low water. To raise a 
tower on it meant placing a foundation 
under water, a new and perilous experiment. 

"Work upon the rock in the earliest stages 
was confined to the calmest days of the 
summer season, when the tides were lowest, 
the water smoothest, and the wind in its 
calmest mood. Under such conditions the 
men were able to stay on the site for about 
five hours. . . * 

6 



THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 

"One distinct drawback was the neces- 
sity to establish a depot some distance from 
the erecting site. Those were the days be- 
fore steam navigation, and the capricious 
sailing craft offered the only means of main- 
taining communication between rock and 
shore, and for the conveyance of men and 
materials to and fro. . . . 

"A temporary beacon was placed on the 
reef, while adjacent to the site selected for 
the tower a smith's forge was made fast, so 
as to withstand the dragging motion of the 
waves when the rock was submerged. The 
men were housed on the Smeaton, which, 
during the spells of work on the rock, rode at 
anchor a short distance away in deep water."* 

Once the engineers were all but lost when 
the Smeaton slipped her moorings and left 
them stranded on the rock. 

In spite of all the obstacles, the work was 
completed at the end of two years and the 
light was shown for the first time Feb- 
ruary 1, 1811. 

* Talbot, "Lightships and Lighthouses." 
7 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

"I found Robert Stevenson an appreci- 
ative and intelligent companion," writes 
Sir Walter Scott in his journal, speaking of 
a cruise he made among the islands of 
Scotland with a party of engineers. The 
notes made by him on this trip were used 
afterward in his two stories, "The Pirate" 
and "Lord of the Isles." 

"My grandfather was king in the service 
to his fmger-tips," wrote Louis Stevenson. 
"All should go his way, from the principal 
light-keeper's coat to the assistant's fender, 
from the gravel in the garden walks to the 
bad smell in the kitchen, or the oil spots on 
the storeroom floor. It might be thought 
there was nothing more calculated to awaken 
men's resentment, and yet his rule was not 
more thorough than it was beneficent. 
His thought for the keepers was continual. 
. . . When a keeper was sick, he lent him 
his horse and sent him mutton and brandy 
from the ship. . . . They dwelt, many of 
them, in uninhabited isles or desert fore- 
lands, totally cut off from shops. 



THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 

" No servant of the Northern Lights 
came to Edinburgh but he was entertained 
at Baxter Place. There at his own table 
my grandfather sat down delightedly with 
his broad-spoken, homespun officers." 

As he grew old his "medicine and delight" 
was his annual trip among his lighthouses, 
but at length there came a time when this 
joy was taken away from him and there 
came "the end of all his cruising; the knowl- 
edge that he had looked the last on Sun- 
burgh, and the wild crags of Skye, and the 
Sound of Mull; that he was never again to 
hear the surf break in Clashcarnock; never 
again to see lighthouse after lighthouse 
(all younger than himself, and the more, 
part of his own device) open in the hour of 
dusk their flower of fire, or the topaz and 
ruby interchange on the summit of Bell 
Rock." 

Throughout the rank and file of his men 

he was adored. "I have spoken with 

many who knew him; I was his grandson, 

and their words may very well have been 

9 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

words of flattery; but there was one thing 
that could not be affected, and that was the 
look that came over their faces at the name 
of Robert Stevenson." 

Of his family of thirteen children, three 
of his sons became engineers. Thomas 
Stevenson, the father of Robert Louis, like 
the others of his family, contributed largely 
to lighthouse building and harbor improve- 
ment, serving under his older brother, Allen, 
in building the Skerryvore, one of the 
most famous deep-sea lights erected on a 
treacherous reef off the west coast where, 
for more than forty years, one wreck after 
another had occurred. 

"From the navigator's point of view, the 
danger of this spot lay chiefly in the fact 
that it was so widely scattered. The ridge 
runs like a broken backbone for a distance 
of some eight miles. ... In rough weather 
the whole of the rocks are covered, and the 
waves, beating heavily on the mass, convert 
the scene into one of indescribable tu- 
mult. . . . 

10 



THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 

"There was only one point where a 
tower could be placed, and this was so 
exposed that the safe handling of men and 
material constituted a grave responsibility." 

It was necessary to erect a tower one 
hundred and thirty feet high; "the loftiest 
and weightiest work of its character that 
had ever been contemplated up to this 
time. . . . 

"The Atlantic swell, which rendered land- 
ing on the ridge precarious and hazardous, 
did not permit the men to be housed upon 
a floating home, as had been the practice 
in the early days of the Bell Rock tower. 
In order to permit the work to go forward 
as uninterruptedly as the sea would allow, 
a peculiar barrack was erected. It was a 
house on stilts, the legs being sunk firmly 
into the rock, with the living quarters 
perched some fifty feet up in the air, 

"Residence in this tower was eerie. The 
men climbed the ladder and entered a small 
room, which served the purposes of kitchen, 
living-room, and parlor. . . . 
11 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

"When a storm was raging, the waves, 
as they combed over the rock, shook the 
legs violently and scurried under the floor 
in seething foam. Now and again a roller, 
rising higher than its fellows, broke upon the 
rock and sent a mass of water against the 
flooring to hammer at the door. Above 
the living-room were the sleeping quarters, 
high and dry, save when a shower of spray 
fell upon the roof and walls like heavy 
hail. . . . The men, however, were not per- 
turbed. Sleeping, even under such con- 
ditions, was far preferable to doubtful rest 
in a bunk upon an attendant vessel, rolling 
and pitching with the motion of the sea. 
They had had a surfeit of such experi- 
ence . . . while the barrack was under 
erection. 

"For two years it withstood the seas 
without incident, and the engineer and men 
came to regard the eyrie as safe as a house 
on shore. But one night the little colony 
received a shock. The angry Atlantic got 
one or two of its trip-hammer blows well 
12 



THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 

home, and smashed the structure to frag- 
ments. Fortunately, at the time it was un- 
tenanted." 

No time was lost in rebuilding the bar- 
rack and this time it withstood all tests until 
it was torn down after Skerry vore was 
finished. 

"While the foundations were being pre- 
pared, and until the barrack was con- 
structed, the men ran other terrible risks 
every morning and night landing upon and 
leaving the polished surface of the reef. 
Five months during the summer was the 
working season, but even then many days 
and weeks were often lost owing to the 
swell being too great to permit the rowing 
boat to come alongside. The engineer re- 
lates that the work was 'a good lesson in 
the school of patience,' because the delays 
were frequent and galling, while every 
storm which got up and expended its rage 
upon the reef left its mark indelibly among 
the engineer's stock in trade. Cranes and 
other materials were swept away as if they 
13 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

were corks; lashings, no matter how strong, 
were snapped like pack-threads. 

"Probably the worst experience was when 
the men on the rock were weather-bound 
for seven weeks during one season. . . . 
Their provisions sank to a very low level, 
they ran short of fuel, their sodden clothing 
was worn to rags. . . . 

"Six years were occupied in the comple- 
tion of the work, and, as may be imagined, 
the final touches were welcomed with thank- 
fulness by those who had been concerned in 
the enterprise." 

It was in meteorological researches and il- 
lumination of lighthouses, however, that 
Thomas Stevenson did his greatest work. 
It was he who brought to perfection the re- 
volving light now so generally used. 

In spite of this and other valuable inven- 
tions his name has remained little known, 
owing to the fact that none of his inventions 
were ever patented. The Stevensons be- 
lieved that, holding government appoint- 
ments, any original work they did belonged 
14 



THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 

to the nation. "A patent not only brings 
in money but spreads reputation," writes 
his son, "and my father's instruments enter 
anonymously into a hundred light rooms 
and are passed anonymously over in a hun- 
dred reports, where the least considerable 
patent would stand out and tell its author's 
story." 

He was beloved among a wide circle of 
friends and the esteem of those in his pro- 
fession was shown when in 1884 they chose 
him for president of the Royal Society of 
Edinburgh. To the general public, how- 
ever, he remained unknown in spite of the 
fact that "His lights were in all parts of 
the world guiding the mariners." 



15 



CHAPTER II 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

"As from the house your mother sees 
You playing round the garden trees, 
So you may see, if you will look 
Through the window of this book. 
Another child, far, far away. 
And in another garden, play." 

— "Child's Garden of Verses." 

ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON 
. was born at No. 8 Howard Place, 
Edinburgh, Scotland, November 13, 1850. 

In 1852 the family moved from Howard 
Place to Inverleith Terrace, and two years 
later to No. 17 Heriot Row, which remained 
their home for many years. 

As a child Louis was very delicate and 
often ill, for years hardly a winter passed 
that he did not spend many days in bed. 
Edinburgh in winter is extremely damp 
and he tells us: "Many winters I never 
crossed the threshold, but used to lie on 
16 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

my face on the nursery floor, chalking or 
painting in water-colors the pictures in the 
illustrated newspapers; or sit up in bed 
with a little shawl pinned about my shoul- 
ders, to play with bricks or what not." 

The diverting history of "Hop-O'-My- 
Thumb" and the "Seven-League Boots," 
"Little Arthur's History of England," 
"Peter Parley's Historical Tales," and 
"Harry's Ladder to Learning" were books 
which he delighted to pore over and their 
pages bore many traces of his skill with 
the pencil and paint-brush. 

Those who have read the "Child's Gar- 
den of Verses" already know the doings of 
his childish days, for although those rhymes 
were not written until he was a grown man 
he was "one of the few who do not forget 
their own lives" and "through the win- 
dows of this book" gives us a vivid and 
living picture of the boy who dwelt so 
much in a world of his own with his quaint 
thoughts. 

If his body was frail his spirit was strong 
17 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

and his power of imagination so great that 
he cheered himself through many a weary 
day by playing he was "captain of a tidy 
little ship," a soldier, a fierce pirate, an In- 
dian chief, or an explorer in foreign lands. 
Miles he travelled in his little bed. 

"I have just to shut my eyes, 
To go sailing through the skies — 
To go sailing far away 
To the pleasant Land of Play" 

he says. 

In spite of his power for amusing himself, 
days like these would have gone far harder 
had it not been for two devoted people, 
his mother and his nurse, Alison Cunning- 
ham or "Cummie" as he called her. His 
mother was devoted to him in every way 
and encouraged his love for reading and 
story-making. She kept a diary of his prog- 
ress from day to day, and treasured every 
picture he drew or scrap he wrote. Cummie 
came to him as a Torryburn lassie when he 
was eighteen months old and was like a 
second mother to him. She not only cared 
18 




No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Stevenson's birthplace 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

for his bodily comforts but was his friend 
and comrade as well. She sang for him, 
danced for him, spun fine tales of pirates 
and smugglers, and read to him so dra- 
matically that his mind was fired then and 
there with a longing for travel and adven- 
ture which he never lost. When they took 
their walks through the streets together 
Cummie had many stories to tell him of 
Scotland and Edinburgh in the old days. 
For Edinburgh is a wonderful old city with 
a wonderful history full of tales of stirring 
adventure and romance. "For centuries it 
was a capitol thatched with heather and 
more than once, in the evil days of English 
invasion, it has gone up in flames to Heaven, 
a beacon to ships at sea. ... It was the 
jousting-ground of jealous nobles, not only 
on Greenside or by the King's Stables, where 
set tournaments were fought to the sound 
of trumpets and under the authority of the 
royal presence, but in every alley whe^-e 
there was room to cross swords. ... In 
the town, in one of those little shops plas- 
19 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

tered like so many swallows' nests among 
the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that 
familiar autocrat James VI, would gladly 
share a bottle of wine with George Heriot 
the goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, 
that so quietly look down on the castle 
with the city lying in waves around it, 
those mad and dismal fanatics, the Sweet 
Singers, haggard from long exposure on the 
moors, sat day and night 'with tearful 
psalms.' ... In the Grassmarket, stiff- 
necked covenanting heroes offered up the 
often unnecessary, but not less honorable, 
sacrifice of their lives, and bade eloquent 
farewell to sun, moon and stars and earthly 
friendships, or died silent to the roll of the 
drums. Down by yon outlet rode Grahame 
of Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, 
with the town beating to arms behind their 
horses' tails — a sorry handful thus riding 
for their lives, but with a man at their head 
who was to return in a different temper, 
make a bold dash that staggered Scotland, 
and die happily in the thick of the fight. . . . 
20 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

"The palace of Holyrood is a house of 
many memories. . . . Great people of yore, 
kings and queens, buffoons and grave am- 
bassadors played their stately farce for cen- 
turies in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, 
dancing has lasted deep into the night, 
murder has been done in its chambers. 
There Prince Charlie held his phantom 
levees and in a very gallant manner repre- 
sented a fallen dynasty for some hours. . . . 

"There is an old story of the subterranean 
passage between the castle and Holyrood 
and a bold Highland piper who volunteered 
to explore its windings. He made his en- 
trance by the upper end, playing a strath- 
spey; the curious footed it after him down 
the street, following his descent by the 
sound of the chanter from below; until all 
of a sudden, about the level of St. Giles the 
music came abruptly to an end, and the 
people in the street stood at fault with hands 
uplifted. Whether he choked with gases, 
or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily 
by the Evil One, remains a point of doubt, 
21 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

but the piper has never again been seen or 
heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he 
wandered down into the land of Thomas the 
Rhymer, and some day, when it is least 
expected, may take a thought to revisit the 
sunlit upper world. That will be a strange 
moment for the cabmen on the stands be- 
side St. Giles, when they hear the crone of 
his pipes reascending from the earth below 
their horses' feet." 

In Edinburgh to-day there are armed 
men and cannon in the castle high up on 
the great rock above you: "You may see 
the troops marshalled on the high parade, 
and at night after the early winter evenfall 
and in the morning before the laggard 
winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over 
Edinburgh the sounds of drums and 
bugles."* 

Long before Louis could write he made 
up verses and stories for himself, and Cum- 
mie wrote them down for him. " I thought 
they were rare nonsense then," she said, 

* Stevenson, " Essay on Edinburgh." 
22 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

little dreaming that these same bits of 
"rare nonsense" were the beginnings of 
what was to make "her boy" famous across 
two seas in years to come. 

He writes of her when speaking of long 
nights he lay awake unable to sleep because 
of a troublesome cough: "How well I re- 
member her lifting me out of bed, carrying 
me to the window and showing me one or 
two lit windows up in Queen Street across 
the dark belt of garden, where also, we told 
each other, there might be sick little boys 
and their nurses waiting, like us, for the 
morning." 

Her devotion to him had its reward in the 
love he gave her all his life. One of his 
early essays written when he was twenty 
and published in the Juvenilia was called 
"Nurses." Fifteen years later came the 
publication of the "Child's Garden of 
Verses" with a splendid tribute to her as 
a dedication. He sent her copies of all his 
books, wrote letters to her, and invited her 
to visit him. She herself tells that the last 
23 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

time she ever saw him he said to her, "be- 
fore a room full of people, ' It's you that 
gave me a passion for the drama, Cummie.' 
'Me, Master Lou,' I said, 'I never put foot 
inside a playhouse in my life.' 'Ay, woman,' 
said he, 'but it was the good dramatic way 
ye had of reciting the hymns.' " 

When he was six years old his Uncle 
David offered a Bible picture-book as a 
prize to the nephews who could write the 
best history of Moses. 

This was Louis's first real literary at- 
tempt. He was not able to write himself, 
but dictated to his mother and illustrated 
the story and its cover with pictures which 
he designed and painted himself. 

He won the prize and from that time, his 
mother says, "it was the desire of his heart 
to be an author." 

During the winter of 1856-57 his favorite 
cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, 
usually called Bob, visited them; a great 
treat for Louis, not only because his ill 
health kept him from making many com- 
24 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

panions of his own age, but because Bob 
loved many of the same things he did and 
to "make believe" was as much a part of 
his life as Louis's. Many fine games they 
had together; built toy theatres, the scenery 
and characters for which they bought for a 
"penny plain and twopence colored," and 
were never tired of dressing up. One of 
their chief delights, he says, was in "rival 
kingdoms of our own invention — Nosing- 
tonia and Encyclopaedia, of which we were 
perpetually drawing maps." Even the eat- 
ing of porridge at breakfast became a game. 
Bob ate his with sugar and said it was an 
island covered with snow with here a moun- 
tain and there a valley; while Louis's was 
an island flooded by milk which gradually 
disappeared bit by bit. 

In the spring and summer his mother 
took him for short trips to the watering- 
places near Edinburgh. But the spot un- 
like all others for a real visit was at Colin- 
ton Manse, the home of his grandfather, the 
Reverend Lewis Balfour, at Colinton, on 
25 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

the Water of Leith, five miles southwest of 
Edinburgh. Here he spent glorious days. 
Not only was there the house and garden, 
both rare spots for one of an exploring turn 
of mind, but, best of all, there were the 
numerous cousins of his own age sent out 
from India, where their parents were, to be 
nursed and educated under the loving eye 
of Aunt Jane Balfour, for whom he wrote: 

"Chief of our aunts — not only I, 
But all the dozen nurslings cry — 
What did the other children do? 
And what was childhood, wanting you?" 

If Louis lacked brothers and sisters he 
had no dearth of cousins, fifty in all they 
numbered, many of them near his own age. 
Alan Stevenson, Henrietta and Willie Tra- 
quair seem to have been his favorite chums 
at Colinton. 

Of his grandfather Balfour he says: "We 
children admired him, partly for his beauti- 
ful face and silver hair ... partly for 
the solemn light in which we beheld him 
once a week, the observed of all observers 
26 




u 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

in the pulpit. But his strictness and dis- 
tance, the effect, I now fancy, of old age, 
slow blood, and settled habits, oppressed us 
with a kind of terror. When not abroad, he 
sat much alone writing sermons or letters 
to his scattered family. . . . The study had 
a redeeming grace in many Indian pictures 
gaudily colored and dear to young eyes. 
. . . When I was once sent in to say a 
psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking 
indeed with fear, but at the same time glow- 
ing with hope that, if I said it well, he 
might reward me with an Indian picture." 
"There were two ways of entering the 
Manse garden," he says, "one the two- 
winged gate that admitted the old phaeton 
and the other a door for pedestrians on the 
side next the kirk. ... On the left hand 
were the stables, coach-houses and washing 
houses, clustered around a small, paved 
court. . . . Once past the stable you were 
fairly within the garden. On summer 
afternoons the sloping lawn was literally 
steeped in sunshine. . . . 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

"The wall of the church faces the manse, 
but the church yard is on a level with the 
top of the wall . , . and the tombstones 
are visible from the enclosure of the manse. 
. . . Under the retaining wall was a some- 
what dark pathway, extending from the 
stable to the far end of the garden, and called 
the 'witches' walk' from a game we used to 
play in it. . . . Even out of the 'witches' 
walk' you saw the Manse facing toward you, 
with its back to the river and the wooded 
bank, and the bright flower-plots and stretches 
of comfortable vegetables in front and on 
each side of it; flower plots and vegetable 
borders, by the way, on which it was almost 
death to set foot, and about which we held 
a curious belief, — namely, that my grand- 
father went round and measured any foot- 
prints that he saw, to compare the measure- 
ment at night with the boots put out for 
brushing; to avoid which we were accustomed, 
by a strategic movement of the foot to make 
the mark longer. . . . 

"So much for the garden; now follow me 
28 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

into the house. On entering the door you 
had before you a stone paved lobby. . . . 
There stood a case of foreign birds, two or 
three marble deities from India and a lily 
of the Nile in a pot, and at the far end the 
stairs shut in the view. With how many 
games of 'tig' or brick-building in the fore- 
noon is the long low dining room connected 
in my mind! The store-room was a most 
voluptuous place, with its piles of biscuit 
boxes and spice tins, the rack for buttered 
eggs, the little window that let in the sun- 
shine and the flickering shadows of leaves, 
and the strong sweet odor of everything that 
pleaseth the taste of men. . . . 

"Opposite the study was the parlor, a 
small room crammed full of furniture and 
covered with portraits, with a cabinet at 
the side full of foreign curiosities, and a sort 
of anatomical trophy on the top. During a 
grand cleaning of the apartment I remember 
all the furniture was ranged on a circular 
grass plot between the churchyard and the 
house. It was a lovely still summer evening, 
29 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

and I stayed out, climbing among the chairs 
and sofas. Falling on a large bone or skull, 
I asked what it was. Part of an albatross, 
auntie told me. 'What is an albatross?' I 
asked, and then she described to me this 
great bird nearly as big as a house, that you 
saw out miles away from any land, sleeping 
above the vast and desolate ocean. She told 
me that the Ancient Mariner was all about 
one; and quoted with great verve (she had a 
duster in her hand, I recollect) — 

'With my crossbow 
I shot the albatross.' 

. , . Willie had a crossbow, but up to this 
date I had never envied him its possession. 
After this, however, it became one of the ob- 
jects of my life." 

With many playmates, free to roam and 
romp as he chose, his illness forgotten, it is 
no wonder he says he felt as if he led two 
lives, one belonging to Edinburgh and one 
to the country, and that Colinton ever re- 
mained an enchanted spot to which it was 
always hard to say good-by. 
30 



CHAPTER III 
THE LANTERN BEARER 

"Perhaps there lives some dreamy boy, untaught 
In school, some graduate of the field or street, 
Who shall become a master of the art, 
An admiral sailing the high seas of thought, 
Fearless and first, and steering with his fleet 
For lands not yet laid down on any chart." 

— Longfellow. 

SCHOOL days began for Louis in 1859, 
but were continually interrupted by ill- 
ness, travel, and change of school. His 
father did not believe in forcing him to study; 
so he roamed through school according to 
his own sweet will, attending classes where 
he cared to, interesting himself in the sub- 
jects that appealed to him — Latin, French, 
and mathematics — neglecting the others 
and bringing home no prizes, to Cummie's 
distress. 

Certain books were his prime favorites at 
this time. "Robinson Crusoe," he says, 
31 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

"and some of the books of Mayne Raid and 
a book called Paul Blake — Swiss Family 
Robinson also. At these I played, con- 
jured up their scenes and delighted to hear 
them rehearsed to seventy times seven. 

"My father's library was a spot of some 
austerity; the proceedings of learned soci- 
eties, cyclopaedias, physical science and above 
all, optics held the chief place upon the 
shelves, and it was only in holes and corners 
that anything legible existed as if by acci- 
dent. Parents' Assistant, Rob Roy, Waver- 
ley and Guy Mannering, Pilgrim's Progress, 
Voyages of Capt. Woods Rogers, Ainsworth's 
Tower of London and four old volumes of 
Punch — these were among the chief ex- 
ceptions. 

" In these latter which made for years the 
chief of my diet, I very early fell in love 
(almost as soon as I could spell) with the 
Snob Papers. I knew them almost by heart 
. . . and I remember my surprise when I 
found long afterward that they were famous, 
and signed with a famous name; to me, as 
32 



THE LANTERN BEARER 

I read and admired them, they were the 
works of Mr. Punch." 

Two old Bibles interested him particularly. 
They had belonged to his grandfather Steven- 
son and contained many marked passages 
and notes telling how they had been read 
aboard lighthouse tenders and on tours of 
inspection among the islands. 

After he was thirteen his health was greatly 
improved and he was able to enjoy the com- 
radeship of other lads, though he never 
cared greatly for sports. He was the leader 
of a number of boys who used to go about 
playing tricks on the neighbors — "tapping 
on their windows after nightfall, and all 
manner of wild freaks." 

"Crusoing" was a favorite game and its 
name stood for all picnicking in the open air, 
building bonfires and cooking apples, but 
the crowning sport of all was "Lantern Bear- 
ing," a game invented by himself and shared 
by a dozen of his cronies. 

"Toward the end of September," he says, 
"when school time was drawing near and the 
33 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

nights were already black, we would begin 
to sally from our respective villas, each 
equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. . . . 
We wore them buckled to the waist upon a 
cricket belt, and over them, such was the 
rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. 
They smelled noxiously of blistered tin; 
they never burned aright, though they 
would always burn our fingers; their use 
was naught; the pleasure of them merely 
fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under 
his top-coat asked for nothing more. 

"When two of these asses met there would 
be an anxious, 'Have you your lantern?' 
and a gratified 'Yes.' That was the shib- 
boleth, and a very needful one too; for as it 
was the rule to keep our glory contained, none 
could recognize a lantern-bearer, unless like 
a polecat, by the smell. 

"The essence of this bliss was to walk by 
yourself in the black night, the slide shut, 
the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping 
whether to conduct your footsteps or make 
your glory public, a mere pillar of darkness 
34 



THE LANTERN BEARER 

in the dark, and all the while, deep down in 
the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you 
had a bull's-eye at your belt and exult and 
sing over the knowledge." 

In later years one of the Lantern Bearers 
describes Louis as he was then. "A slender, 
long legged boy in pepper and salt tweeds, 
with an undescribable influence that forced 
us to include him in our play as a looker on, 
critic and slave driver. ... No one had the 
remotest intention of competing with R. L. S. 
in story making, and his tales, had we known 
it, were such as the world would listen to in 
silence and wonder." 

At home and at his last school he was al- 
ways starting magazines. The stories were 
illustrated with much color and the maga- 
zines circulated among the boys for a penny 
a reading. One was called The Sunbeam 
Magaiine, an illustrated miscellany of fact, 
fiction, and fun, and another The School Boy 
Ma^aiine. The latter contained four stories 
and its readers must have been hard to 
satisfy if they did not have their fill of hor- 
35 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

rors — "regular crawlers," Louis called them. 
In the first tale, "The Adventures of Jan 
Van Steen," the hero is left hidden in a 
boiler under which a fire is lit. The second 
is a "Ghost Story" of robbers in a deserted 
castle. . . . The third is called, "by curious 
anticipation of a story he was to write later 
on, 'The Wreckers.' " 

Numerous plays and novels he began but 
they eventually found their fate in the trash 
basket. An exception to this was a small 
green pamphlet of twenty pages called 
"The Pentland Rising, a page of history, 
1666." It was published through his father's 
interest on the two-hundredth anniversary 
of the fight at Rullion Green. This event in 
Scotland's history had been impressed on his 
mind by the numerous stories Cummie had 
told him of the Covenanters and the fact 
that they had spent the night before their 
defeat in the town of Colinton. 

From the time he was a little chap, bal- 
ancing on the limb of an apple-tree in the 
Colinton garden trying to see what kind of 
36 



THE LANTERN BEARER 

a world lay beyond the garden wall, Louis 
had had a longing to travel and see sights. 
This began to find satisfaction now. 

His father took him on a trip around the 
coast of Fife, visiting the harbor lights. The 
little towns along the coast were already 
familiar to him by the stories of the past. 
Dunfermline, where, according to the ballad, 
Scotland's king once "sat in his tower drink- 
ing blood-red wine"; Kerkcaldy, where the 
witches used to sink "tall ships and honest 
mariners in the North Sea"; and "Wemyss 
with its bat-haunted caves, where the Chev- 
alier Johnstone on his flight from Colloden 
passed a night of superstitious terrors." 

Later the family made a trip to the English 
Lakes and in the winter of the same year to 
the south of France, where they stayed two 
months, then making a tour through Italy 
and Switzerland. The following Christmas 
found Louis and his mother again in Men- 
tone, where they stayed until spring. 

French was one of his favorite studies at 
school, and now after a few months among 
37 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

French people he was able to speak fluently. 
Indeed, in after life he was often mistaken 
for a Frenchman. 

His French teacher on his second visit to 
Mentone gave him no regular lessons, but 
"merely talked to him in French, teaching 
him piquet and card tricks, introducing him 
to various French people and taking him to 
concerts and other places; so, his mother re- 
marks, like Louis' other teachers at home I 
think they found it pleasanter to talk to him 
then to teach him." 

After their return to Edinburgh came the 
time when, his school days finished, Louis 
must make up his mind what his career is 
to be and train himself for it. 

Even then he knew what he wanted to do 
was to write. He had fitted up a room on 
the top floor at Heriot Row as a study and 
spent hours there covering paper with stories 
or trying to describe in the very best way 
scenes which had impressed him. Most of 
these were discarded when finished. " I liked 
doing them indeed," he said, "but when 
38 



THE LANTERN BEARER 

done I could see they were rubbish." He 
never doubted, however, that some day his 
attempts would prove worth while, if he 
could only devote his time to learning to 
write and write well. 

His father, he knew, had different plans for 
him, however. Of course, Louis would fol- 
low in his footsteps and be the sixth Steven- 
son to hold a place on the Board of Northern 
Lights. So, although he had little heart in 
the work, he entered the University of 
Edinburgh and spent the next three and a 
half years studying for a science degree. 

The summer of 1868 he was sent with an 
engineering party to Anstruther, on the coast, 
where a breakwater was being built. There 
he had his first opportunity of seeing some 
of the practical side of engineering. It was 
rough work, but he enjoyed it. Later he 
spent three weeks on Earraid Island, off Mull, 
a place which left a strong impression on his 
mind and figured afterward as the spot 
where David Balfour was shipwrecked. 

Among the experiences at that time which 
39 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

pleased him most was a chance to descend 
in a diver's dress to the foundation of the 
harbor they were building. In his essays, 
"Random Memories," he tells of the "dizzy 
muddleheaded joy" he had in his surround- 
ings, swaying like a reed, and grabbing at the 
fish which darted past him. 

In writing afterward of these years he 
says: "What I gleaned I am sure I do not 
know, but indeed I had already my own 
private determination to be an author . . . 
though I haunted the breakwater by day, 
and even loved the place for the sake of the 
sunshine, the thrilling sea-side air, the wash 
of the waves on the sea face, the green 
glimmer of the diver's helmets far below. 
. . . My own genuine occupation lay else- 
where and my only industry was in the hours 
when I was not on duty. I lodged with a 
certain Bailie Brown, a carpenter by trade, 
and there as soon as dinner was despatched 
. . . drew my chair to the table and pro- 
ceeded to pour forth literature. 

"I wish to speak with sympathy of my 
education as an engineer. It takes a man 
40 



THE LANTERN BEARER 

into the open air; keeps him hanging about 
harbor sides, the richest form of idling; it 
carries him to wild islands; it gives him a 
taste of the genial danger of the sea . . . 
and when it has done so it carries him back 
and shuts him in an office. From the roar- 
ing skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing 
boat, he passes to the stool and desk, and 
with a memory full of ships and seas and 
perilous headlands and shining pharos, he 
must apply his long-sighted eyes to the 
pretty niceties of drawing or measure his 
inaccurate mind with several pages of con- 
secutive figures." 

"The roaring skerry and the tossing boat," 
appealed to him as they had to his grand- 
father before him, but they did not balance his 
dislike for the "office and the stool" or make 
him willing to devote his time and energy to 
working for them, so his university record 
was very poor. "No one ever played the 
truant with more deliberate care," he says, 
"and no one ever had more certificates (of 
attendance) for less education." 

One thing that he gained from his days at 
41 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

the university was the friendship of Pro- 
fessor Fleeming Jenkin. He was fifteen 
years older than Louis, but they had many 
common interests and the professor had much 
good influence over him. He was one of the 
first to see promise in his writing and en- 
couraged him to go on with it. 

Both the professor and Mrs. Jenkin were 
much interested in dramatics and each year 
brought a group of friends together at their 
house for private theatricals. Stevenson was 
a constant visitor at their home, joining 
heartily in these plays and looking forward 
to them, although he never took any very 
important part. 

After Professor Jenkin's death Stevenson 
wrote his biography, and says it was a 
"mingled pain and pleasure to dig into the 
past of a dead friend, and find him, at every 
spadeful, shine brighter." 

About this time Thomas Stevenson bought 

Swanston Cottage in the Pentland Hills, 

about five miles from Edinburgh, and for 

the next fourteen years the family spent 

■ 42 



THE LANTERN BEARER 

their summers there, and Louis often went 
out in winter as well. It ever remained one 
of his favorite spots and with Colinton stood 
out as a place that meant much in his life. 

These years saw great change in him; from 
a frank and happy child he had grown into 
a lonely, moody boy making few friends and 
shunning the social life that his father's 
position in Edinburgh offered him. He de- 
scribes himself as a "lean, ugly, unpopular 
student," but those who knew him never 
applied the term "ugly" to him at any time. 

At Swanston he explored the hills alone 
and grew to know them so well that the 
Pentland country ever remained vividly in 
his memory and found its way into many of 
his stories, notably "St. Ives," where he de- 
scribes Swanston as it was when they first 
made it their summer home. 

Many solitary winter evenings he spent 
there rereading his favorite novels, par- 
ticularly Dumas 's "Vicomte de Bragelonne," 
which always pleased him. "Shakespeare 
has served me best," he said. "Few living 
43 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

friends have had upon me an influence so 
strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Per- 
haps my dearest and best friend outside of 
Shakespeare is D'Artagnan, the elderly D'Ar- 
tagnan of the 'Vicomte de Bragelonne.' 

"I would return in the early night from 
one of my patrols with the shepherd, a friendly 
face would meet me in the door, a friendly 
retriever scurry up stairs to fetch my slippers, 
and I would sit down with the Vicomte for a 
long, silent, solitary lamp-lit evening by the 
fire." 

At Swanston he first began to really write, 
"bad poetry," he says, and during his soli- 
tary rambles fought with certain problems 
that perplexed him. 

Here he made the acquaintance of the 
Scotch gardener, Robert Young, and John 
Todd, the "Roaring Shepherd, the oldest 
herd on the Pentlands," whom he accom- 
panied on his rounds with the sheep, listen- 
ing to his tales told in broad Scotch of the 
highland shepherds in the old days when 
"he himself often marched flocks into Eng- 
44 



THE LANTERN BEARER 

land, sleeping on the hillsides with his cara- 
van; and by his account it was rough busi- 
ness not without danger. The drove roads 
lay apart from habitation; the drivers met 
in the wilderness, as to-day the deep sea 
fishers meet off the banks in the solitude of 
the Atlantic." 

All this time Louis was idling through the 
university, knowing that in the end he would 
make nothing of himself as an engineer and 
dreading to confess it to his father. At 
length, however, his failure in his studies 
came to Thomas Stevenson's attention, and, 
on being questioned about it "one dreadful 
day" as they were walking together, the boy 
frankly admitted that his heart was not with 
the work and he cared for nothing but to be 
able to write. 

While at school his father had encouraged 
him to follow his own bent in his studies and 
reading, but when it came to the point of 
choosing his life-work, there ought to be no 
question of doubt. The only natural thing 
for Louis to do was to carry on the great and 
45 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

splendid work that he himself had helped to 
build up. That the boy should have other 
plans of his own surprised and troubled him. 
Literature, he said, was no profession, and 
thus far Louis had not done enough to prove 
he had a claim for making it his career. 

After much debate it was finally decided 
that he should give up engineering, but 
should enter the law school and study to be 
admitted to the bar. This would not only 
give him an established profession, but leave 
him a little time to write as well. 



46 



CHAPTER IV 

EDINBURGH DAYS 

" I am fevered with the sunset, 
I am fretful with the bay, 
For the wander-thirst is on me 
And my soul is in Cathay. 

"There's a schooner in the offing. 
With her topsails shot with fire. 
And my heart has gone aboard her 
For the island of Desire." 

— Richard Hovey. 

IN spite of the fact that his law studies 
now left him an opportunity for the work 
he wanted so much to do, Louis was far 
from happy, for between his parents and 
himself, who had always been the best of 
friends, there were many misunderstand- 
ings. 

Thomas Stevenson was bitterly disap- 
pointed that his only son should choose to 
be what he called "an idler" — generous to 
a fault and always out of money, dressing in 
47 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

a careless and eccentric way, which both 
amused and annoyed his friends and caused 
him to be ridiculed by strangers, preferring 
to roam the streets of old Edinburgh scrap- 
ing acquaintance with the fishwives and 
dock hands, rather than staying at home and 
mingling in the social circle to which his 
parents belonged. But his father was still 
more troubled by certain independent re- 
ligious opinions, far different from those in 
which he had been reared, that Louis adopted 
at this time. 

How any good result could come from all 
this neither his father nor mother could see, 
and with the loss of their sympathy he was 
thrown upon himself and was lonely and re- 
bellious. 

He longed to get away from it all, to quit 
Edinburgh with its harsh climate, and often 
on his walks he leaned over the great bridge 
that joins the New Town with the Old "and 
watched the trains smoking out from under, 
and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage 
to brighter skies." He longed to go with 
48 



EDINBURGH DAYS 

them "to that Somewhere-else of the imagi- 
nation where all troubles are supposed to 
end." 

It was a comfort to him at this time to 
remember other Scotchmen, Jeffries, Burns, 
Fergusson, Scott, Carlyle, and others, who 
had roamed these same streets before him, 
not a few of them fighting with the same 
problems he faced in their struggle to win 
their ideal. 

This unhappy time, this "Greensickness," 
as he called it, came to an end, however, 
through the help of what Louis had always 
secretly longed for — friends. Several whom 
he met at this time influenced him, but first 
of them all he put his cousin Robert Alan 
Mowbray Stevenson (Bob), who returned to 
Edinburgh about this time from Paris, where 
he had been studying art. 

Louis says: "The mere return of Bob 
changed at once and forever the course of 
my life; I can give you an idea of my relief 
only by saying that I was at last able to 
breathe. ... I was done with the sullens for 
49 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

good. ... I had got a friend to laugh 
with." 

Here at last was a companion who under- 
stood him and sympathized with what he 
was trying to do. Since as children they 
had made believe together in their rival 
kingdoms of "Nosingtonia" and "Ency- 
clopaedia" they had had many traits and 
tastes in common. They now began where 
they had left off and proceeded to enjoy 
themselves once more by all sorts of wild 
pranks and gay expeditions. 

The Speculative Society became another 
great source of pleasure. It was an old soci- 
ety and had numbered among its members 
such men of note as Scott, Jeffrey, Robert 
Emmet, and others. Once a week from 
November to March the "Spec," as it was 
called, met in rooms in the University of 
Edinburgh. An essay was read and debates 
followed with much hot discussion, which 
delighted Stevenson. "Oh, I do think the 
Spec is about the best thing in Edinburgh," 
he said enthusiastically. 
50 



EDINBURGH DAYS 

Sir Walter Simpson, son of the famous 
doctor, Sir James Simpson, who discovered 
chloroform, became another chum about 
this time, and for the next ten years they 
were much together. He likewise was study- 
ing law and was a near neighbor. The 
Simpsons kept open house, and it was the 
custom for a group of cronies to drop in at all 
hours of day and night. Louis was among 
those who came oftenest, and Sir Walter's 
sister writes: "He would frequently drop in 
to dinner with us, and of an evening he had 
the run of the smoking room. After ten 
p.m. the 'open sesame' to our door was a 
rattle on the letter box and Louis' fancy for 
the mysterious was whetted by this admit- 
tance by secret sign, and we liked his special 
rat-a-tat for it was the forerunner of an hour 
or two of talk." 

They teased him about his queer clothes 
and laughed at some of his wild ideas, but 
he seldom was angry at them for it and 
never stayed away very long. 

With them he often skated on Duddington 
51 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

Loch or canoed on the Firth of Forth. One 
summer he and Sir Walter yachted off the 
west coast of Scotland, and still another year, 
when longing for further wandering possessed 
them, they made a trip in canoes through the 
inland waters of Belgium from Antwerp to 
Brussels, and then into France and by the 
rivers Sambre and Oise nearly to Paris. 

In the "Inland Voyage," where Steven- 
son describes this trip, he calls Sir Walter 
and his canoe "Cigarette" while he was 
"Arethusa." Adventures were plentiful, and 
they aroused much curiosity among the 
dwellers on the banks, with whom they 
made friends as they went along. 

Once Arethusa was all but drowned, when 
his canoe was overturned by the rapids; 
and on several occasions, when they applied 
for a night's lodging, they were suspected of 
being tramps or peddlers because of their be- 
draggled appearance. 

One evening after a hard day's paddling 
in the rain they landed tired, wet, and hun- 
gry at the little town of La, Fere. "The 
52 



EDINBURGH DAYS 

Cigarette and I could not sufficiently con- 
gratulate each other on the prospect," says 
the Arethusa, "for we had been told there 
was a capital inn at La Fere. Such a dinner 
as we were going to eat 1 Such beds as we 
were going to sleep in ! and all the while the 
rain raining on homeless folk over all the 
poplared country-side. It made our mouths 
water. The inn bore the name of some wood- 
land animal, stag, or hart, or hind, I for- 
get which. But I shall never forget how 
spacious and how eminently comfortable it 
looked as we drew near. ... A rattle of 
many dishes came to our ears; we sighted a 
great field of tablecloth; the kitchen glowed 
like a forge and smelt like a garden of things 
to eat. 

"Into this . . . you are now to suppose 
us making our triumphal entry, a pair of 
damp rag-and-bone men, each with a limp 
india-rubber bag upon his arm. I do not 
believe I have a sound view of that kitchen; 
I saw it through a sort of glory, but it seemed 
to me crowded with the snowy caps of cook- 
53 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

men, who all turned round from their sauce- 
pans and looked at us with surprise. There 
was no doubt about the landlady however; 
there she was, heading her army, a flushed, 
angry woman, full of affairs. Her I asked 
politely — too politely, thinks the Ciga- 
rette — if we could have beds, she surveying 
us coldly from head to foot. 

" 'You will find beds in the suburb,' she 
remarked. 'We are too busy for the like of 
you.' 

"If we could make an entrance, change 
our clothes, and order a bottle of wine 1 felt 
sure we could put things right, so I said, ' If 
we can not sleep, we may at least dine,' and 
was for depositing my bag. 

"What a terrible convulsion of nature was 
that which followed in the landlady's face! 
She made a run at us and stamped her foot. 

" 'Out with you — out of the doorl' she 
screeched. 

"I do not know how it happened, but the 
next moment we were out in the rain and 
darkness. This was not the first time that 
54 



EDINBURGH DAYS 

I have been refused a lodging. Often and 
often I have planned what I would do if 
such a misadventure happened to me again, 
and nothing is easier to plan. But to put in 
execution, with a heart boiling at the in- 
dignity? Try it, try it only once, and tell 
me what you did." 

Frequently on this trip the Arethusa's odd 
dress and foreign looks led him to be taken 
for a spy. It was not long after the Franco- 
Prussian war, and all sorts of rumors of sus- 
picious characters were afloat. Once he was 
actually arrested and thrown into a dungeon 
because he could show no passport, and 
the commissary refused to believe he was 
English and puzzled his head over the 
scraps of notes and verses found in his 
knapsack. 

He was rescued by the faithful Cigarette, 
who finally convinced the officials that they 
were British gentlemen travelling in this odd 
way for pleasure, and the things in his friend's 
bag were not plans against the government, 
but merely scraps of poetry and notes on 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

their travels that he liked to amuse himself 
by making as they went along.* 

The canoe trips ended in a visit to the 
artists' colony at Fontainebleau, where Bob 
Stevenson and a brother of Sir Walter's 
were spending their summer. This place 
always had a particular attraction for Louis 
and he spent many weeks both there and at 
Grez near by during the next few years. 

The free and easy life led by the artists 
suited him exactly, although he found it 
hard to accomplish any work of his own, but 
dreamed and planned all sorts of essays, 
verses, and tales which he never wrote, while 
the others put their pictures on canvas. 

" I kept always two books in my pocket," 
he says, "one to read and one to write in. 
As I walked my mind was busy fitting what 
I saw with appropriate words; when I sat 
by the roadside I would either read, or a 
pencil and penny version-book would be in 
my hand, to note down the features of the 

*This incident is told in the " Epilogue to An In- 
land Voyage." 

56 



EDINBURGH DAYS 

scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. 
Thus I lived with words." 

If there was little work to show after a 
stop at Fontainebleau he had many mem- 
ories of good-fellowship and some of the 
friends he met there were to be the first to 
greet him when he came to live on this side 
of the water. 

While on their "Inland Voyage" the two 

canoemen had decided that the most perfect 

mode of travel was by canal-boat. What 

could be more delightful? "The chimney 

smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks 

of the canal slowly unroll their scenery to 

contemplative eyes; the barge floats by great 

forests and through great cities with their 

public buildings and their lamps at night; 

and for the bargee, in his floating home, 

'travelling abed,' it is merely as if he were 

listening to another man's story or turning 

the leaves of a picture book in which he had 

no concern. He may take his afternoon walk 

in some foreign country on the banks of the 

canal, and then come home to dinner at his 

own fireside." 

57 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

They grew most enthusiastic over the idea 
and told one another how they would furnish 
their "water villa" with easy chairs, pipes, 
and tobacco, and the bird and the dog should 
go along too. 

By the time Fontainebleau was reached 
they had planned trips through all the canals 
of Europe. The idea took the artists' fancy 
also, and a group of them actually pur- 
chased a canal-boat called The Eleven 
Thousand Virgins of Cologne. Furnishing a 
water villa, however, was more expensive 
than they had foreseen, and she came to a 
sad end. " 'The Eleven Thousand Virgins 
of Cologne' rotted in the stream where she 
was beautified . . . she was never harnessed 
to the patient track-horse. And when at 
length she was sold, by the indignant car- 
penter of Moret, there was sold along with 
her the Arethusa and the Cigarette . . . now 
these historic vessels fly the tricolor and are 
known by new and alien names." 

In 1873 Stevenson planned to try for ad- 
mission to the English bar instead of the 
58 



EDINBURGH DAYS 

Scottish and went to London to take the 
examination. But his health, which had been 
rather poor, became worse, and on reaching 
London the doctor ordered him to Mentone 
in the south of France, where he had been 
before as a boy. 

There he spent his days principally lying 
on his back in the sun reading and playing 
with a little Russian girl with whom he 
struck up a great friendship. His letters to 
his mother were full of her sayings and do- 
ings. He was too ill to write much, although 
one essay, "Ordered South," was the out- 
come of this trip, the only piece of writing 
in which he ever posed as an invalid or talked 
of his ill health. 

At the end of two months he improved 
enough to return to Edinburgh, but gave up 
the idea of the English bar. His illness and 
absence seemed to have smoothed out some 
of the difficulties at home, and after he re- 
turned things went happier in every way. 

On July 14, 1875, he passed his final law 
examinations, and was admitted to the 
59 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

Scottish bar. He was now entitled to wear 
a wig and gown, place a brass plate with his 
name upon the door of 17 Heriot Row, and 
"have the fourth or fifth share of the- ser- 
vices of a clerk" whom it is said he didn't 
even know by sight. For a few months he 
made some sort of a pretense at practising, 
but it amounted to very little. Gradually 
he ceased paying daily visits to the Parlia- 
ment House to wait for a case, but settled 
himself instead in the room on the top floor 
at home and began to write, seriously this 
time — it was to be his life-work from now 
on — and the law was forgotten. 

His first essays were published in the 
Cornhill Magaiine and The Portfolio under 
the initials R. L. S., which signature in time 
grew so familiar to his friends and to those 
who admired his writings it became a second 
name for him, and as R. L. S. he is often 
referred to. 

He was free now to roam as he chose and 
spent much time in Paris with Bob. The 
life there in the artists' quarter suited him 
60 



EDINBURGH DAYS 

as well as it had at Fontainebleau. There, 
among other American artists, he was as- 
sociated with Mr. Will Low, a painter, whom 
he saw much of when he came to New York. 

One September he took a walking trip in 
the Cevenne Mountains with no other com- 
panion than a little gray donkey, Modestine, 
who carried his pack and tried his patience 
by turns with her pace, which was "as much 
slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a 
run," as he tells in the chronicle of the trip. 

A visit at Grez in 1876 was to mark a 
point in his life. Heretofore the artists' 
colony had been composed only of men. 
This year there were three new arrivals, 
Americans, a Mrs. Osbourne and her young 
son and daughter. Their home in Cali- 
fornia had been broken up and the mother 
had come to Grez to paint for the summer. 

Those who had been there for a number of 
years, R. L. S. among them, looked on the 
newcomers as intruders and did not hesi- 
tate to say so among themselves. Before 
the summer was over, however, they were 
61 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

obliged to confess that the newcomers had 
added to the charms of Grez, and Louis 
found in Mrs. Osbourne another companion 
to add to his rapidly growing list. 

When the artists scattered in the autumn 
and he returned to Edinburgh and Mrs. 
Osbourne to California, he carried with him 
the hope that some time in the future they 
should be married. 

For the next three years he worked hard. 
He published numerous essays in the Corn- 
hill Magazine and his first short stories, 
"A Lodging for the Night," "Will O' the 
Mill," and the "New Arabian Nights." 
These were followed by his first books of 
travel, "An Inland Voyage," giving a 
faithful account of the adventures of the 
Arethusa and the Cigarette, and "Travels 
with a Donkey in the Cevennes." 

When the latter was published, Mr. Walter 
Crane made an illustration for it showing 
R. L. S. under a tree in the foreground in his 
sleeping-bag, smoking, while Modestine con- 
tentedly crops grass by his side. Above him 
62 



EDINBURGH DAYS 

winds the path he is to take on his journey, 
encouraging Modestine with her burden to a 
livelier pace with his goad; receiving the 
blessing of the good monks at the Monastery 
of Our Lady of the Snows; stopping for a 
bite and sup at a wayside tavern; conversing 
with a fellow traveller by the way; and 
finally disappearing with the sunset over the 
brow of the hill. 

Some time previous to all this he had 
written in a letter: "Leslie Stephen, who 
was down here to lecture, called on me, and 
took me up to see a poor fellow, a poet who 
writes for him, and who has been eighteen 
months in our Infirmary, and may be for all 
I know eighteen months more. Stephen and 
I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fel- 
low sat up in his bed with his hair and beard 
all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he 
had been in a king's palace of blue air." 

This was William Ernest Henley, and his 

brave determination to live and work, though 

he knew he must ever remain in a maimed 

condition, roused Stevenson's sincere admira- 

63 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

tion. With his usual impetuous generosity, 
he brought him books and other comforts 
to make his prolonged stay in the infirmary 
less wearisome and a warm friendship sprang 
up between them. 

As Henley grew stronger they planned to 
work together and write plays. Stevenson 
had done nothing of the kind since he was 
nineteen. Now they chose to use the same 
plot that he had experimented with at that 
time. It was the story of the notorious 
Deacon Brodie of Edinburgh, which both con- 
sidered contained good material for a play. 

"A great man in his day was the Deacon; 
well seen in good society, crafty with his 
hands as a cabinet-maker, and one who 
could sing a song with taste. Many a citi- 
zen was proud to welcome the Deacon to 
supper, and dismiss him with regret . . . 
who would have been vastly disconcerted 
had he known how soon, and in what guise 
his visitor returned. Many stories are told 
of this redoubtable Edinburgh burgher. . . . 
A friend of Brodie's . . . told him of a pro- 
64 



EDINBURGH DAYS 

jected visit to the country, and afterward^ 
detained by some affairs, put it off and stayed 
the night in town. The good man had lain 
some time awake; it was far on in the small 
hours by the Tron bell; when suddenly 
there came a crack, a jar, a faint light. 
Softly he clambered out of bed and up to a 
false window which looked upon another 
room, and there, by the glimmer of a thieves' 
lantern, was his good friend the Deacon in a 
mask." 

At length after a certain robbery in one 
of the government offices the Deacon was 
suspected. He escaped to Holland, but was 
arrested in Amsterdam as he was about to 
start for America. He was brought back to 
Edinburgh, was tried and convicted and 
hanged on the second of October, 1788, at 
the west end of the Tol booth, which was the 
famous old Edinburgh prison known as the 
Heart of Midlothian. 

This story of Brodie had always inter- 
ested Stevenson since he had heard it as a 
child, and a cabinet made by the clever 
65 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

Deacon himself formed part of the furniture 
of his nursery. 

"Deacon Brodie" and other plays were 
finished and produced, but never proved 
successful. Indeed, the money came in but 
slowly from any of his writings and, aside 
from the critics, it was many a long day 
before he was appreciated by the people of 
his own city and country. They refused to 
believe that "that daft laddie Stevenson," 
who had so often shocked them by his ec- 
centric ways and scorn of conventions, could 
do anything worth while. So by far his 
happiest times were spent out of Scotland, 
principally in London, where a membership 
in the Savile Club added to his enjoyment. 
Here he met several interesting men, among 
them Edmund William Gosse and Sidney 
Colvin, both writers and literary critics, with 
whom he became very intimate. 

"My experience of Stevenson," writes Mr. 
Gosse, "during these first years was confined 
to London upon which he would make sud- 
den piratical descents, staying a few days or 
66 



EDINBURGH DAYS 

weeks and melting into thin air again. He 
was mucii at my house, and it must be told 
that my wife and I, as young married people, 
had possessed ourselves of a house too large 
for our slender means immediately to furnish. 
The one person who thoroughly approved of 
our great bare absurd drawing room was 
Louis, who very earnestly dealt with us on 
the immorality of chairs and tables, and 
desired us to sit always, as he delighted to 
sit, upon hassocks on the floor. Neverthe- 
less, as armchairs and settees straggled into 
existence, he handsomely consented to use 
them, although never in the usual way, but 
with his legs thrown sidewise over the arms 
of them, or the head of a sofa treated as a 
perch. In particular, a certain shelf with 
cupboards below, attached to a bookcase, is 
worn with the person of Stevenson, who 
would spend half an evening, while passion- 
ately discussing some question . . . leaping 
sidewise in a seated posture to the length of 
this shelf and back again. 
"... These were the days when he most 
67 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

frequented the Savile Club, and the lightest 
and most vivacious part of him there came 
to the surface. He might spend the morn- 
ing in work or business, and would then 
come to the club for luncheon. If he were 
so fortunate as to find a congenial compan- 
ion disengaged, or to induce them to throw 
over their engagements, he would lead him 
off to the smoking-room, and there spend 
an afternoon in the highest spirits and the 
most brilliant and audacious talk. 

"He was simply bubbling with quips and 
jests. I am anxious that his laughter-loving 
mood should not be forgotten, because later 
on it was partly, but I think never wholly 
quenched, by ill health, responsibility and 
advance of years. 

"His private thoughts and prospects must 
often have been of the gloomiest, but he 
seems to have borne his unhappiness with a 
courage as high as he ever afterwards dis- 
played." 

Sidney Colvin he met some time previous 
while visiting relatives in England, and their 
68 



EDINBURGH DAYS 

friendship was renewed wlien they met again 
in London; a friendship which lasted through- 
out their lives and which even the distance 
of two seas failed to obliterate. They kept 
up a lively correspondence and Mr. Colvin 
aided him with the publication of his writ- 
ings while he was absent from his own coun- 
try. After his death, according to Steven- 
son's wishes, Mr. Colvin edited a large col- 
lection of his letters and in the notes which 
he added paid his friend many splendid 
tributes which show him to be a fair critic 
as well as an ardent admirer. " He had only 
to speak," he says, " in order to be recognized 
in the first minute for a witty and charming 
gentleman, and within the first five minutes 
for a master spirit and man of genius." 

Louis's long absences from home often 
troubled his mother and caused her to com- 
plain when writing. In one answer to her 
about this time he said: 

"You must not be vexed at my absences, 
you must understand I shall be a nomad, 
more or less, until my days be done. You 
69 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

don't know how much I used to long for it 
in the old days; how I used to go and look at 
the trains leaving, and wish to go with them. 
And now, you know, that I have a little 
more that is solid under my feet, you must 
take my nomadic habit as a part of me. 
Just wait till I am in swing and you will see 
that I shall pass more of my life with you 
than elsewhere; only take me as I am and 
give me time. I must be a bit of a vaga- 
bond." 

For all so little of his writing was ever 
done in his own country, nevertheless he 
turned to Scotland again and again for the 
setting of his stories and the subject of his 
essays. Although he often spoke harshly of 
Edinburgh when at home, he paid her many 
loving tributes in writing of her in a foreign 
land: "The quaint grey-castled city where 
the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind 
squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. 
... I do not even know if I desire to live 
there, but let me hear in some far land a 
kindred voice sing out 'Oh, why left I my 
70 



EDINBURGH DAYS 

hame?' and it seems at once as if no beauty 
under the kind heavens, and no society of 
the wise and good, can repay me for my 
absence from my own country. And al- 
though I think I would rather die elsewhere, 
yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried 
among good Scotch clods. I will say it 
fairly, it grows on me with every year; there 
are no stars so lovely as the Edinburgh street 
lamps. When I forget thee, Auld Reekie, 
may my right hand forget its cunning." 



71 



CHAPTER V 

AMATEUR EMIGRANT 

"Hope went before them 
And the world was wide." 

IN the summer of 1879 R. L. S. was once 
more seized with the desire to roam 
and to roam farther than ever before. Cali- 
fornia had been beckoning to him for some 
time, and in August he suddenly made up 
his mind, and with scarcely a word of fare- 
well to his family and friends he embarked 
on the steamship Devonia, bound for New 
York. 

Partly for the sake of economy, for he 
determined to pay his own way on this 
venture, and partly because he was anxious 
to experience emigrant life, he engaged pas- 
sage in the second cabin, which in those days 
differed very little from the steerage. The 
main advantages were a trifle better food 
72 



AMATEUR EMIGRANT 

and a cabin to himself witli a table where 
he could write. 

In his usual way he soon made acquain- 
tance with his fellow passengers and did them 
many a friendly turn. They took him for 
one of themselves and showed little curiosity 
as to where he came from, who he was, or 
where he was going. He says: "The sailors 
called me 'mate,' the officers addressed me 
as 'my man,' my comrades accepted me with- 
out hesitation for a person of their own char- 
acter and experience. One, a mason him- 
self, believed I was a mason, several, among 
these at least one of the seamen, judged me 
to be a petty officer in the American navy; 
and I was so often set down for a practical 
engineer that at last I had not the heart to 
deny it." 

The emigrants were from many countries, 
though the majority were Scotch and Irish 
bound for the new world with the hope of 
meeting with better fortune than they had 
had in the old, and they whiled away the 
days at sea in their several ways, making the 
73 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

best of their discomforts and cheering one 
another when they grew lonely or homesick 
for those they had left behind. 

When the weather was good their spirits 
rose and there were many rounds of singing 
and story-telling as they sat clustered to- 
gether like bees under the lee of the deck- 
house, and in all of these Stevenson joined 
heartily. 

"We were indeed a musical ship's com- 
pany," he says, "and cheered our way into 
exile with the fiddle, the accordion, and the 
songs of all nations, good, bad or indifferent 

— Scottish, English, Irish, Russian or Norse 

— the songs were received with generous ap- 
plause. Once or twice, a recitation, very 
spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scotch 
accent, varied the proceedings; and once we 
sought in vain to dance a quadrille, eight 
men of us together, to the music of the violin. 
The performers were humorous, frisky fel- 
lows, who loved to cut capers in private life; 
but as soon as they were arranged for the 
dance, they conducted themselves like so 

74 



AMATEUR EMIGRANT 

many mutes at a funeral. I have never seen 
decorum pushed so far; and as this was not 
expected, the quadrille was soon whistled off, 
and the dancers departed. 

"But the impulse to sing was strong, and 
triumphed over modesty and even the in- 
clemencies of the sea and sky. On one rough 
Saturday night, we got together by the main 
deck-house, in a place sheltered from the 
wind and rain. Some clinging to the ladder 
which led to the hurricane-deck and the rest 
knitting arms or taking hands, we made a 
ring to support the women in the violent 
lurching of the ship, and when we were thus 
disposed, sang to our hearts' content. 

"There was a single chess-board and a 
single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as 
twenty of us would be playing dominoes for 
love. There were feats of dexterity, puzzles 
for the intelligence and a regular daily com- 
petition to guess the vessel's progress; at 
twelve o'clock when the result was published 
in the wheel house, came to be a moment of 
considerable interest. . . . We had beside, 
75 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

romps in plenty. Puss in the Corner, which 
we rebaptized, in more manly style, Devil 
and Four Corners, was my favorite game; 
but there were many who preferred another, 
the humor of which was to box a person's 
ears until he found out who cuffed him." 

The voyage, which lasted ten days, was 
uneventful except for some rough weather 
when Stevenson found his cabin most stuffy 
and uncomfortable. He was not really ill, 
however, and spent much of the time finish- 
ing a tale called "The Story of a Lie," while 
his table played "Bob Jerry with the ink 
bottle." On his arrival in New York the 
story was sent back to London with the fol- 
lowing letter to Sidney Colvin: 

"On Board S. S. Devonia an hour or two 
out of New York, Aug., 1879. 
"My Dear Colvin: 

"I have finished my story. The hand- 
writing is not good because of the ship's mis- 
conduct; thirty-one pages in ten days at sea 
is not bad. I am not very well; bad food, 
76 



AMATEUR EMIGRANT 

bad air and hard work have brought me 
down. But the spirits keep good. The 
voyage has been most interesting and will 
make, if not a series of Pall Mall articles, at 
least the first part of a new book. The last 
weight on me has been trying to keep notes 
for this purpose. Indeed I have worked like 
a horse and am tired as a donkey. If I 
should have to push on far by rail, I shall 
bring nothing but my fine bones to port. 

"Goodbye to you all. I suppose it is now 
late afternoon with you all across the seas. 
What shall I find over here? I dare not 
wonder. — Ever yours R. L. S." 

As California was the goal he aimed for, 
in spite of his fatigue after ten days of poor 
living and the sea, he determined to push on 
immediately in an emigrant train bound for 
the Pacific coast. 

On reaching port he and a man named 
Jones, with whom he had had more in com- 
mon than with any of his other fellow pas- 
sengers, landed together. 
77 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

"Jones and I issued into West Street, sit- 
ting on some straw in tlie bottom of an open 
baggage wagon. It rained miraculously, and 
from that moment till on the following night 
I left New York, there was scarce a lull, and 
no cessation of the downpour. . . . 

"It took but a few moments, though it 
cost a good deal of money, to be rattled along 
West Street to our destination: Reunion 
House, No. 10 West Street, ' kept by one 
Mitchell.' 

"Here I was at last in America and was 
soon out upon the New York streets, spying 
for things foreign. . . . 

"The following day I had a thousand and 
one things to do; only the day to do them 
in and a journey across the continent before 
me in the evening. ... It rained with 
potent fury; every now and then I had to 
get under cover for a while in order, so to 
speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for 
under this continued drenching it began 
to grow damp on the inside. I went to 
banks, post-offices, railway offices, restau- 
78 



AMATEUR EMIGRANT 

rants, publishers, book sellers and money 
changers. 

" I was so wet when I got back to Mitch- 
ell's toward evening, that I had simply to 
divest myself of my shoes, socks and trousers, 
and leave them behind for the benefit of 
New York City. No fire could have dried 
them ere I had to start; and to pack them in 
their present condition was to spread ruin 
among my other possessions. With a heavy 
heart I said farewell to them as they lay a 
pulp in the middle of a pool upon the floor 
of Mitchell's kitchen. 1 wonder if they are 
dry by now." 

That night he joined a party of emigrants 
bound for the West, the weight of his bag- 
gage much increased by the result of his 
day's purchases — Bancroft's "History of 
the United States" in six fat volumes. So 
in less than twenty-four hours after landing 
on one coast he was on his way to the other. 

If at times he had been uncomfortable on 
the steamer he was ten times more so on the 
train. It is hard to realize in these days of 
79 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

easy travelling what the discomforts of riding 
in the emigrant trains were; crowded to- 
gether in badly lighted, badly ventilated 
cars, with stiff wooden benches on either 
side, which were most uncomfortable to sit on 
and next to impossible to lie down upon. 
Meals were taken as best they might when 
they stopped at way stations while some 
bought milk and eggs and made a shift to 
cook themselves a meal or brew a cup of tea 
on the stove at the end of the car. 

Over a week of this sort of slow travelling 
through the heat of the plains was enough 
to tax the strength and courage of the most 
robust man, let alone one in as delicate 
health as Stevenson at that time, and it is 
a wonder he ever lived through it. Indeed, 
he was ill but kept cheerful in spite of all, 
and was interested in the country and the 
sights along the way. His own discomforts 
seemed to dwindle when he contrasted them 
with those the pioneers endured travelling 
that same direction twenty years before; 
crawling along in ox-carts with their cattle 
80 



AMATEUR EMIGRANT 

and family possessions; suffering hunger, 
thirst, and infinite weariness, and living in 
daily terror of attack from the Indians. 

He made note of all he saw and the doings 
of his fellow emigrants, to be used later on. 
Letters to Henley and Colvin en route are 
interesting. 

" In the Emigrant Train from New York 
to San Francisco, Aug., 1879. 

Dear Colvin, — I am in the cars between 
Pittsburg and Chicago, just now bowling 
through Ohio. I am taking charge of a kid, 
whose mother is asleep, with one eye while 
I write you this with the other. I reached 
N. Y. Sunday night, and by five o'clock 
Monday was underway for the West. It 
is now about ten on Wednesday morning, 
so I have already been forty hours in the 
cars. It is impossible to lie down in them, 
which must end by being very wearying. . . . 

"No man is any use until he has dared 
everything; I feel just now as if I had, and 
so might become a man. 'If ye have faith 
81 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

like a grain of mustard seed.' That is so 
true! Just now I have faith as big as a 
cigar case, I will not say die, and I do not 
fear man nor fortune. — R. L. S." 

"Crossing Nebraska, Saturday, 
Aug. 23, 1879. 
"My dear Henley, — l am sitting on the 
top of the cars with a mill party from Mis- 
souri going west for his health. Desolate 
flat prairie upon all hands. . . . When we 
stop, which we do often, for emigrants and 
freight travel together, the kine first, the 
man after, the whole plain is heard singing 
with cicadae. This is a pause, as you may 
see from the writing. What happened to 
the old pedestrian emigrants; what was the 
tedium suffered by the Indians and trappers 
of our youth, the imagination trembles to 
conceive. This is now Saturday, 23rd, and I 
have been steadily travelling since I parted 
from you at St, Pancras. It is a strange 
vicissitude from the Savile Club to this; I 
sleep with a man from Pennsylvania who has 
82 



AMATEUR EMIGRANT 

been in the Navy Yard, and mess with him 
artd the Missouri bird already alluded to. 
We have a tin wash-bowl among four, I wear 
nothing but a shirt and a pair of trousers 
and never button my shirt. When I land 
for a meal, I pass my coat and feel dressed. 
This life is to last until Friday, Saturday or 
Sunday next. It is a strange affair to be an 
emigrant, as I hope you shall see in a future 
work. I wonder if this will be legible; my 
present station on the wagon roof, though 
airy, compared to the cars, is both dirty 
and insecure. I can see the track straight 
before and straight behind me to either 
horizon. . . . 

"Our journey is through ghostly deserts, 
sage brush and alkali, and rocks without 
form or color, a sad corner of the world. I 
confess I am not jolly, but mighty calm, in 
my distresses. My illness is a subject of 
great mirth to some of my fellow travel- 
lers, and I smile rather sickly at their 
jests. 

"We are going along Bitter Creek just 
83 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

now, a place infamous in the history of 
emigration, a place I shall remember myself 
among the blackest. — R. L. S." 

When California was finally reached he 
decided to rest and recover strength by 
camping out for a few days in the Coast 
Range Mountains beyond Monterey, but the 
anxiety and strain of the long journey had 
been greater than he realized, and he broke 
down and became very ill. For two nights 
he lay out under the trees in a kind of stupor 
and at length was rescued by two frontiers- 
men in charge of a goat-ranch, who took him 
to their cabin and cared for him until he 
partly recovered. 

"Here is another curious start in my life," 
he wrote to Sidney Colvin. "I am living 
at an Angora goat-ranch, in the Coast Line 
Mountains, eighteen miles from Monterey. 
I was camping out, but got so sick that the 
two rancheros took me in and tended me. 
One is an old bear hunter, seventy-two years 
old, and a captain from the Mexican War; 
84 



AMATEUR EMIGRANT 

the other a pilgrim, and one who was out 
with the bear flag and under Fremont when 
California was taken by the States. They 
are both true frontiersmen, and most kind 
and pleasant. Captain Smith, the bear 
hunter, is my physician, and I obey him like 
an oracle. . . . 

"I am now lying in an upper chamber, 
with the clinking of goat bells in my ears, 
which proves to me that the goats are come 
home and it will soon be time to eat. The 
old bear hunter is doubtless now infusing 
tea; and Tom the Indian will come in with 
his gun in a few moments. . . . 

"The business of my life stands pretty 
nigh still. I work at my notes of the voyage. 
It will not be very like a book of mine; but 
perhaps none the less successful for that. 
I will not deny that I feel lonely to-day. . . . 
I have not yet had a word from England, 
partly, I suppose, because I have not yet 
written for my letters to New York; do not 
blame me for this neglect, if you knew all 
I have been through, you would wonder I 
85 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

had done as much as I have. I teach the 
ranch children reading in the morning, for 
the mother is from home sick. 

"Ever your affectionate friend 
"R. L. S." 

As soon as Stevenson was well enough he 
returned to Monterey and fell to working 
upon several short stories and the notes of his 
voyage, which he brought together and pub- 
lished later under the titles "The Amateur 
Emigrant" and "Across the Plains." 

Monterey in those days was a small Mex- 
ican town; "a place of two or three streets 
economically paved with sea-sand, and two 
or three lanes, which were the water courses 
in the rainy season. . . . The houses were, 
for the most part, built of unbaked adobe 
brick. . . . 

"There was no activity but in and around 
the saloons, where the people sat almost all 
day playing cards. The smallest excursion 
was made on horseback. You would scarcely 
ever see the main street without a horse or 
86 



AMATEUR EMIGRANT 

two tied to posts, and making a fine figure 
with their Mexican housings. In a place so 
exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw 
not only Mexican saddles, but true Vaquero 
riding — men always at a hand gallop, up 
hill and down dale, and round the sharpest 
corners, urging their horses with cries and 
gesticulations and cruel rotary spurs, check- 
ing them dead, with a touch, or wheeling 
them right about face in a square yard. 
Spanish was the language of the street." 

He lodged with a doctor and his wife, and 
took his meals at the little restaurant kept 
by Jules Simoneau, "a most pleasant old 
boy," with whom he played chess and dis- 
cussed the universe daily. 

About the middle of December he pushed 
on to San Francisco, and prepared to settle 
down and work for an indefinite time. Though 
he had known but few people in Monterey, 
nevertheless it was a social little place in 
comparison to a great city like San Fran- 
cisco, where Stevenson found himself indeed 
a stranger and friendless and learned for the 
87 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

first time in his life wliat it really meant to 
be lonely. 

Funds were running low; so he secured 
the cheapest possible lodging and took his 
meals at various small restaurants, living 
at the rate of seventy cents a day. 

On December 26 he wrote: " For four days 
I have spoken to no one but my landlady or 
landlord or the restaurant waiters. This is 
not a gay way to pass Christmas, is it?" 
But some days later, nothing daunted, he 
added: "I lead a pretty happy life, though 
you might not think it. I have great fun 
trying to be economical, which I find as 
good a game of play as any other. I have 
no want of occupation and though I rarely 
see any one to speak to, have little time to 
worry." 

To make matters worse, letters containing 
money went astray and word came that 
some articles submitted to his publishers in 
England, on which he had depended for 
funds, were not satisfactory, and this forced 
him to reduce his living expenses to forty- 



AMATEUR EMIGRANT 

five cents a day. The letters from home 
were most unsatisfactory and lacked the 
kind of news he longed for. "Not one soul 
ever gives me any news,'' he complained to 
Sidney Colvin, "about people or things, 
everybody writes me sermons; it is good for 
me, but hardly the food necessary for a man 
who lives all alone on forty-five cents a day, 
and sometimes less, with quantities of hard 
work and many heavy thoughts. If one of 
you could write me a letter with a jest in it, 
a letter like what is written to real people in 
the world — I am still flesh and blood — I 
should enjoy it. Simpson did the other day, 
and it did me as much good as a bottle of 
wine — man alive I want gossip." 

Day in and day out he worked doggedly, 
fighting discouragement, with little strength 
or inspiration to write anything very worth 
while. 

To cap all, his landlady's little boy fell 

ill, and Stevenson, who had a great love and 

sympathy for all children, helped to nurse 

him, and this proved too much in the nervous 

89 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

and exhausted state he was in. The boy 
recovered, but Stevenson fell ill again, and 
for six weeks hovered between life and death. 

This seems to have been the turning-point 
in his ill luck. Toward the middle of Feb- 
ruary, as he slowly began to mend, he was 
cheered on by long letters from home, full 
of anxiety for his health and advances of 
money from his father, with strict instruc- 
tions that from now on he was no longer to 
stint and deny himself the bare necessities of 
life, as he had been doing. Later, in April, 
came a telegram from Thomas Stevenson 
saying that in future Louis was to count on 
an income of two hundred and fifty pounds 
a year. 

Cheered with the prospect of an easier 
road ahead of him, he struggled back to life 
once more with a strong resolve to work 
harder and make those at home proud of him. 

"It was a considerable shock to my pride 

to break down," he wrote to a friend, "but 

there it's done and can not be helped. Had 

my health held out another month, I should 

90 



AMATEUR EMIGRANT 

have made a year's income, but breaking 
down when I did, I am surrounded by un- 
finished works. It is a good thing my father 
was on the spot, or I should have had to 
work and die." 

Early in the spring he and Mrs. Osbourne 
met again, and on May 19, 1880, they were 
married in San Francisco. 

For the rest of his life Stevenson had no 
cause to complain of loneliness, for in his 
wife he had an "inseparable sharer of all 
his adventures; the most open-hearted of 
friends to all those who loved him; the most 
shrewd and stimulating critic of his work; 
and in sickness, despite her own precarious 
health, the most devoted and most efficient 
of nurses." 

Immediately after their marriage Steven- 
son and his wife and stepson — and the dog 
— went to the Coast Range Mountains and, 
taking possession of an old deserted miner's 
camp, practically lived out-of-doors for the 
next few months, with no neighbors aside 
from a hunter and his family. 
91 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

This was healthy, but the life of a squatter 
has its limitations, and their trials and tribu- 
lations during these weeks Stevenson told 
most amusingly in "The Silverado Squat- 
ters." 

Gradually a longing began to come to 
R. L. S. to see those at home once more and 
have them know his wife. This desire grew 
so from day to day that July found them 
bidding good-by to California, and on the 
7th of August they sailed from New York 
for Liverpool. 



92 



CHAPTER VI 

SCOTLAND AGAIN 

"Bells upon the city are ringing in the night, 
High above the gardens are the houses full of light. 
On the heathy Pentlands is the curlew flying free, 
And the broom is blowing bonnie in the north coun- 
trie. 

"We canna break the bonds that God decreed to bind, 

Still we'll be the children of the heather and the wind. 

Far away from home O, it's still for you and me 

That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north coun- 

trie." 

ON his return to Scotland the spell of 
his own land fell upon R. L. S. for the 
first time. He realized now how he loved 
it spite of its bad climate, how much there 
was at home waiting for him. "After all," 
he said, "new countries, sun, music, and all 
the rest, can never take down our gusty, 
rainy, smoky, grim old city out of the first 
place it has been making for itself in the 
bottom of my soul." 

93 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

But he had returned only to be banished. 
The doctors found his lungs too weak to risk 
Edinburgh winters and advised him to try 
the Alps. 

Accordingly a cottage was rented in Davos 
Platz, a health resort. There and at similar 
places near by they spent the next few winters 
with visits to England and France between. 
Switzerland never suited Stevenson. He 
disliked living among invalids, and with his 
love for exploring the nooks and corners of 
any spot he was in he felt like a prisoner 
when he found himself shut in a valley 
among continual snow with few walks pos- 
sible for him to take. "The mountains are 
about me like a trap," he complained. "You 
can not foot it up a hillside and behold the 
sea on a great plain, but live in holes and 
corners and can change only one for the 
other." 

Tobogganing was the only sport of Davos 

Platz he really enjoyed, and he pursued that 

to his heart's content. "Perhaps the true 

way to toboggan is alone and at night," he 

94 



SCOTLAND AGAIN 

said. " First comes the tedious climb dragging 
your instrument behind you. Next a long 
breathing space, alone with the snow and 
pine woods, cold, silent and solemn to the 
heart. Then you push off; the toboggan 
fetches away, she begins to feel the hill, to 
glide, to swim, to gallop. In a breath you 
arcrout from under the pine-trees and the 
whole heaven full of stars reels and flashes 
overhead." 

He accomplished little work at this time.' 
Sometimes for days he would be unable to 
write at all. But the little boy who had once 
told his mother, "I have been trying to 
make myself happy," was the same man 
now who could say: "I was never bored in 
my life." When unable to do anything else 
he would build houses of cards or lie in bed 
and model little figures in clay. Anything 
to keep his hands busy and his mind dis- 
tracted from the stories that crowded his 
brain and he had not strength to put on 
paper. His one horror, the fear that urged 
him on to work feverishly when he was suf- 
95 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

fering almost beyond endurance, was the 
thought that his illness might one day make 
him a helpless invalid. 

The splendid part to think of is that no 
hint of his dark days and pains crept into 
his writings or saddened those who came to 
see him. Complaint he kept to himself, 
prayed that he might "continue to be eager 
to be happy," lived with the best that was 
in him from day to day, and the words that 
went forth from his sick-room have cheered 
and encouraged thousands. 

When asked why he wrote so many 
stories of pirates and adventurers with few 
women to soften them he replied: "I sup- 
pose it's the contrast; I have always ad- 
mired great strength, even in a pirate. Cour- 
age has interested me more than anything 
else." 

He and his stepson had grown to be great 
chums. At Silverado Lloyd had been seized 
with a desire to write stories and had set up 
a toy printing-press which turned off several 
tales. At Davos Platz they both tried their 
96 



SCOTLAND AGAIN 

hand at illustrating these stories with pic- 
tures cut on wood-blocks and gayly colored. 
Lloyd's room was quite a gallery of these 
artistic attempts. But their favorite di- 
version was to play at a war game with lead 
soldiers. In after-years Lloyd wrote his 
recollections of the days they spent together 
enjoying this fun and he says: "The war 
game was constantly improved and elabo- 
rated, until from a few hours, a war took 
weeks to play, and the critical operations in 
the attic monopolized half our thoughts. 
This attic was a most chilly and dismal spot, 
reached by a crazy ladder, and unlit save for 
a single frosted window; so low at the eaves 
and so dark that we could seldom stand up- 
right, nor see without a candle. Upon the 
attic floor a map was roughly drawn in chalks 
of different colors, with mountains, rivers, 
towns, bridges, and roads of two classes. 
Here we would play by the hour, with tin- 
gling fingers and stiffening knees, and an in- 
tentness, zest, and excitement that I shall 
never forget. 

97 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

"The mimic battalions marclied and 
counter-marched, changed by measured evo- 
lutions from column formation into line, 
with cavalry screens in front and massed 
support behind, in the most approved mili- 
tary fashion of today." 

Neither of them ever grew too old for this 
sport. Year after year they went back to 
the game. Even when they went to Samoa 
they laid out a campaign room with maps 
chalked on the floor. 

In the spring of 1885 Thomas Stevenson 
purchased a house at Bournemouth, England, 
near London, as a present for his daughter- 
in-law. 

They named the cottage "Skerryvore," 
after the famous lighthouse he had helped 
to build in his young days, and it was their 
home for the next three years — busy ones 
for R. L. S. 

It was a real joy to have his father and 
mother and Bob Stevenson with them again 
and his friends in London frequently drop in 
for a visit. 

98 



SCOTLAND AGAIN 

His health was never worse than during 
the Bournemouth days. He seldom went 
beyond his own garden-gate but lived, as he 
says, "like a weevil in a biscuit." Yet he 
never worked harder or accomplished more. 
He wrote in bed and out of bed, sick or well, 
poems, plays, short stories, and verses. 

He finished "Treasure Island," the book 
that gained him his first popularity, and 
wrote "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," which 
made him famous at home and abroad. 

"Treasure Island" had been started some 
time previous to please Lloyd, who asked him 
to write a "good story." It all began with 
a map. Stevenson always loved maps, and 
one day during a picture-making bout he 
had drawn a fine one. "It was elaborately 
and (I thought) beautifully colored," he 
says. "The shape of it took my fancy be- 
yond expression; it contained harbors that 
pleased me like sonnets. ... I ticketed my 
performance Treasure Island." 

Immediately the island began to take life 
and swarm with people, all sorts of strange 
99 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

scenes began to take place upon it, and as 
he gazed at his map Stevenson discovered 
the plot for the "good story." 

"It is horrid fun," he wrote, "and begins 
in the Admiral Benbow public house on the 
Devon coast; all about a map and a treasure 
and a mutiny, and a derelict ship . . . and 
a doctor and a sea-cook with one leg with 
the chorus *yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.' 
... No women in the story, Lloyd orders." 

Parts of the coast at Monterey flashed 
back to his mind and helped him to picture 
the scenery of his "Treasure Island." "It 
was just such a place as the Monterey sand 
hills the hero John Hawkins found himself 
on leaving his mutinous shipmates. It was 
just such a thicket of live oak growing low 
along the sand like brambles, that he crawled 
and dodged when he heard the voices of the 
pirates near him and saw Long John Silver 
strike down with his crutch one of his mates 
who had refused to join in his plan for 
murder." 

As the story grew he read each new chapter 
100 



SCOTLAND AGAIN 

aloud to the family in the evening. He was 
writing it for one boy, but found he had 
more in his audience. "My father," he says, 
"not only heard with delight the daily 
chapter, but set himself actively to collabo- 
rate. When the time came for Billy Bones' 
chest to be ransacked, he must have passed 
the better part of a day preparing on the 
back of a legal envelope an inventory of its 
contents, which I exactly followed, and the 
name of Flint's old ship, the Walrus, was 
given at his particular request." 

When the map was redrawn for the book 
it was embellished with "blowing whales and 
sailing ships; and my father himself brought 
into service a knack he had of various writ- 
ing, and elaborately forged the signature of 
Captain Flint and the sailing directions of 
Billy Bones." 

These daily readings were rare treats to 
those at Skerryvore, for Stevenson was a 
most dramatic reader. "When he came to 
stand in the place of Silver you could almost 
have imagined you saw the great one-legged 
101 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

John Silver, joyous-eyed, on the rolling 
sea." 

The book was not long in springing into 
popularity. Not only the boys enjoyed it 
but all sorts of staid and sober men became 
boys once more and sat up long after bed- 
time to finish the tale. Mr. Gladstone caught 
a glimpse of it at a friend's house and did 
not rest the next day until he had procured 
a copy for himself, and Andrew Lang said: 
"This is the kind of stuff a fellow wants. I 
don't know when, except Tom Sawyer and the 
Odyssey, that I ever liked a romance so well." 

It was translated into many different lan- 
guages, even appearing serially in certain 
Greek and Spanish papers. 

"Kidnapped" followed; a story founded 
on the Appan murder. David Balfour, the 
hero, was one of his own ancestors; Alan 
Breck had actually lived, and the Alison 
who ferried Alan and David over to Torry- 
burn was one of Cummie's own people. The 
Highland country where the scenes were 
laid, he had traversed many times, and the 
102 



SCOTLAND AGAIN 

Island of Earraid, where David was ship- 
wrecked, was the spot where he had spent 
some of his engineering days. 

Stevenson had often said the "brownies" 
in his dreams gave him ideas for his tales. 
At Skerryvore they came to him with a 
story that among all his others is counted 
the greatest. 

"In the small hours one morning," says 
his wife, " I was awakened by cries of horror 
from Louis. Thinking he had a nightmare 
I awakened him. He said angrily, 'Why 
did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine 
bogey tale.' " 

The dream was so vivid that he could not 
rest until he had written off the story, and it so 
possessed him that the first draft was finished 
within three days. It was called "The 
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." 

This story instantly created much discus- 
sion. Articles were written about it, ser- 
mons were preached on it, and letters poured 
in from all sorts of people with their theories 
about the strange tale. Six months after it 
103 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

was published nearly forty thousand copies 
were sold in England alone; but its greatest 
success was in America where its popularity 
was immediate and its sale enormous. 

One day he was attracted by a book of 
verses about children by Kate Greenaway, 
and wondered why he could not write some 
too of the children he remembered best of 
all. Scenes and doings in the days spent 
at Colinton with his swarm of cousins; the 
games they had played and the people they 
had known all trooped back with other 
memories of Edinburgh days. As he re- 
called these children, they tripped from his 
pen until he had a delightful collection of 
verses and determined to bring them to- 
gether in a book. 

First he called it "The Penny Whistle," 
but soon changed the title to "A Child's 
Garden of Verses" and dedicated it, with 
the following poem, to the only one he said 
who would really understand the verses, the 
one who had done so much to make his child- 
hood days happy: 

104 



SCOTLAND AGAIN 
TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM 

FROM HER BOY 

"For the long nights you lay awake 
And watched for my unworthy sake; 
For your most comfortable hand 
That led me through the uneven land; 
For all the story-books you read; 
For all the pains you comforted; 
For all you pitied, all you bore 
In sad and happy days of yore; — 
My second Mother, my first wife, 
The angel of my infant life — 
From the sick child, now well and old. 
Take, nurse, the little book you hold! 

"And grant it. Heaven, that all who read, 
May find as dear a nurse at need. 
And every child who lists my rhyme. 
In the bright fireside, nursery clime, 
May hear it in as kind a voice 
As made my childish days rejoice." 

"Of course," he said, speaking of this 
dedication when he wrote to Cummie 
about the book, "this is only a flourish, like 
taking off one's hat, but still a person who 
has taken the trouble to write things does 
not dedicate them to anyone without meaning 
105 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

it; and you must try to take this dedication 
in place of a great many things that I might 
have said, and that I ought to have done; to 
prove that I am not altogether unconscious 
of the great debt of gratitude I owe you." 

If Thomas Stevenson had been one of the 
first to doubt his boy's literary ability, he 
was equally quick to acknowledge himself 
mistaken. He was proud of his brilliant son, 
keenly interested in whatever he was work- 
ing on and, during the days spent together at 
Skerryvore, gave him valuable aid in his 
writing. 

To have this old-time comradeship with 
his father, to enjoy his sympathy and under- 
standing once more was Stevenson's greatest 
joy at this time; a joy which he sorrowfully 
realized he must soon part with forever as 
his father's health was failing rapidly. 

Thomas Stevenson remained at Skerry- 
vore until April, 1887, when he left for a 
short visit to Edinburgh. While there he 
became suddenly worse and died on the 8th 
of May. 

106 



SCOTLAND AGAIN 

Louis's greatest reason for remaining in 
England was gone now, and he determined 
to cross the ocean with his family once more. 

His mother willingly gave up her home, 
her family, her friends, and the comforts 
she had always enjoyed to go with him to 
a new country, on any venture he might 
propose if his health could only be improved 
thereby. 

On August 21, 1887, Louis bade good-by 
to Scotland for the last time and sailed away 
from London on the steamship Ludgate Hill 
for New York. 



107 



CHAPTER VII 
SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 

"Tis a good land to fall in with men, and a pleasant 
land to see." 

— {Words spoken by Hendrih Hudson when 
he first brought his ship through the Nar- 
rows and saw the Bay of New York.) 

STEVENSON'S second landing in New 
York was a great contrast to his first. 
The "Amateur Emigrant" had no one to 
bid him welcome and Godspeed but a West 
Street tavern-keeper, and now when Mr. 
Will Low, his old friend of Fontainebleau 
days, hastened to the dock to welcome him 
on the Ludgate Hill, he found the author of 
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" already sur- 
rounded by reporters. 

The trip had done him good in spite of 

their passage having been an unusually 

rough one, with numerous discomforts. The 

Ludgate Hill was not an up-to-date liner and 

lOS 



SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 

she carried a very mixed cargo. The very 
fact of her being a tramp ship and that the 
passengers were free to be about with the 
men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, 
and enjoy a real sea life, delighted Stevenson, 
and he wrote back to Sidney Colvin: 

"I enjoyed myself more than I could have 
hoped on board our floating menagerie; stal- 
lions and monkeys and matches made our 
cargo; and the vast continent of the incon- 
gruities rolled the while like a haystack; and 
the stallions stood hypnotized by the motion, 
looking through the port at our dinner table, 
and winked when the crockery was broken; 
and the little monkeys stared at one another 
in their cages . . . and the big monkey, 
Jacko, scoured about the ship and rested 
willingly in my arms . . . the other pas- 
sengers, when they were not sick, looked on 
and laughed. Take all this picture, and 
make it roll till the bell shall sound unex- 
pected notes and the fittings shall break 
loose in our state rooms, and you have the 
voyage of the Ludgate Hill. She arrived in 
109 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

the port of New York without beer, porter, 
soda-water, curagoa, fresh meat, or fresh 
water, and yet we lived and we regret her." 

After a short visit with friends in New- 
port they returned to New York and settled 
down for a time in the Hotel St. Stephen, on 
11th Street, near University Place, to make 
plans for their winter's trip. 

Soon after their arrival "Jekyll and Hyde" 
was dramatized and produced with great 
success. When it was known that the 
author of this remarkable story was in the 
city, people flocked from all sides to call on 
him, and fairly wearied him with their at- 
tentions, although he liked to see them and 
made many interesting acquaintances at the 
time. 

Washington Square was one of his favorjte 
spots in New York, and he spent many hours 
there watching the children playing about. 
A day he always recalled with special plea- 
sure was the one when he had spent a whole 
forenoon in the Square talking with Mark 
Twain. 

110 



SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 

Among those who were anxious to know 
Stevenson was the American sculptor Au- 
gustus St. Gaudens. He had been delighted 
with his writings and regretted he had not 
met him in Paris when he and Mr. Low had 
been there together. "If Stevenson ever 
comes to New York," he said to Mr. Low, 
"I want to meet him," and added that he 
would consider it a great privilege if Steven- 
son would permit him to make his por- 
trait. 

It was with much pleasure, therefore, that 
Mr. Low brought them together, and they 
took to one another immediately. " I like 
your sculptor. What a splendid straight- 
forward and simple fellow he is," said Steven- 
son; and St. Gaudens's comment after their 
first meeting was: "Astonishingly young, not 
a bit like an invalid and a bully fellow." 

Stevenson readily consented to sit for his 
portrait, and they spent many delightful 
hours together while the sketches were being 
made for it. 

One day the sculptor brought his eight- 
Ill 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

year-old son, Homer, with him, and years 
afterward gave the following description of 
the child's visit: 

"On the way I endeavored to impress on 
the boy the fact that he was about to see a 
man whom he must remember all his life. 
It was a lovely day and as I entered the room 
Stevenson lay as usual on rather a high bed. 
I presented Homer to him . . . but since 
my son's interest, notwithstanding my in- 
junctions, was to say the least far from en- 
thusiastic, I sent him out to play. 

" I then asked Stevenson to pose but that 
was not successful ... all the gestures being 
forced and affected. Therefore I suggested 
to him that if he would try to write, some 
natural attitude might result. He assented 
and taking a sheet of paper ... he pulled 
his knees up and began. Immediately his 
attitude was such that I was enabled to 
create something of use and continued draw- 
ing while he wrote with an occasional smile. 
Presently I finished and told him there was 
no necessity for his writing any more. He 
112 




ip 
< 



SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 

did not reply but proceeded for quite a while. 
Then he folded the paper with deliberation, 
placed it in an envelope, addressed it, and 
handed it to me. It was to 'Master Homer 
St. Gaudens.' 

"I asked him: 'Do you wish me to give 
this to the boy?' 

"'Yes.' 

'"When? Now?' 

" 'Oh, no, in five or ten years, or when I 
am dead.' 

"I put it in a safe and here it is: 

"May 27, 1888. 
"Dear Homer St. Gaudens — Your fa- 
ther has brought you this day to see me 
and tells me it is his hope you may remem- 
ber the occasion. I am going to do what 
I can to carry out his wish; and it may amuse 
you, years after, to see this little scrap of 
paper and to read what I write. I must 
begin by testifying that you yourself took no 
interest whatever in the introduction, and in 
the most proper spirit displayed a single- 
113 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

minded ambition to get back to play, and 
this I thought an excellent and admirable 
point in your character. You were also, — I 
use the past tense with a view to the time 
when you shall read rather than to that 
when I am writing, — a very pretty boy, 
and to my European views startlingly self- 
possessed. My time of observation was so 
limited that you must pardon me if I can 
say no more . . . but you may perhaps like 
to know that the lean, flushed man in bed, 
who interested you so little, was in a state 
of mind extremely mingled and unpleasant; 
harassed with work which he thought he was 
not doing well, troubled with difficulties to 
which you will in time succeed, and yet look- 
ing forward to no less a matter than a voyage 
to the South Seas and the visitation of savage 
and desert islands. 

"Your father's friend, 

"Robert Louis Stevenson." 

The portrait was finished in bas-relief and 
many copies were made of it. The most 
114 



SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 

familiar is the one giving only Stevenson's 
head and shoulders, but the splendid big one 
placed as a memorial to him in St. Giles's 
Cathedral in Edinburgh shows him as he 
must have looked that day lying in bed, 
writing to Homer St. Gaudens. 

Another man in New York whom Steven- 
son had admired for years and longed to 
meet was General Sherman. The war was 
long past, and he was then an old gentleman 
living very quietly. One day St. Gaudens 
took Stevenson to call on him, and he was 
asked afterward if he was at all disappointed 
in his hero. 

"Disappointed," he exclaimed. "It was 
simply magnificent to stand in the presence 
of one who has done what he has, and then 
to find him so genial and human. It was the 
next thing to seeing Wellington, and I dare 
say the Iron Duke would not have been half 
so human." 

The anticipation of a train trip across the 
continent was so distasteful that a proposed 
visit to Colorado was given up, and they de- 
115 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

cided to try the climate of the Adirondacks 
for the winter instead. 

They chose Saranac, not far from the 
Canadian border, and rented a cottage there. 

The climate was as unpleasant as possible. 
It rained, snowed, sleeted, and froze con- 
tinually. The cold at times was arctic, the 
thermometer dropping thirty degrees below 
zero in January. "Venison was crunching 
with ice after being an hour in the oven, and 
a large lump of ice was still unmelted in a 
pot where water was steaming all around it." 

Their cottage was dubbed "Hunter's 
Home." It was far from the railroad, few 
luxuries were to be had, and they lived a 
simple life in earnest. 

Of course, they had a dog; no "hunter's 
home" would be complete without one, but 
Louis scouted the idea of adding things as 
unfitting as plush table-covers and uphol- 
stered footstools. The table went bare, and 
he fashioned a footstool for his mother out 
of a log, in true backwoods fashion. 

His wife and mother found the cold hard 
116 



SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 

to bear, but he stood it remarkably well and 
benefited by it. Saranac reminded him of 
Scotland, he said, without the smell of peats 
and the heather: 

Dressed in a buffalo coat, astrakhan cap, 
and Indian boots, he and Lloyd walked, 
skated, or went sleighing every day. 

His pen was kept busy also. A new novel, 
"The Master of Ballantrae," was started, and 
he contributed a series of articles to Scrib- 
nefs Magaiine. For these he was paid a 
regular sum offered by the publishers and 
agreed upon in advance — a new experience. 
It made him feel "awfu' grand," he told a 
Scotch friend. 

A venture he had been longing to make 
since a boy was a cruise among the islands of 
the South Seas. While enduring the bitter 
cold of Saranac such hazy ideas as he had had 
about such a trip began to form themselves 
into a definite scheme. He was anxious for 
a long voyage; perhaps the warm sea air 
might cure him after all else had failed. 

So night after night he and Lloyd eagerly 
117 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

pored over books and maps, and the family 
discussed plans for such an expedition. 

When spring came Mrs. Stevenson started 
for San Francisco to secure, if possible, a 
yacht in which they might undertake such a 
cruise. If all went well Louis and his mother 
and Lloyd would follow. 

While they waited for results they spent 
the time at Manasquan, on the New Jersey 
coast. There Stevenson and his son enjoyed 
the sailing, and their New York friends came 
often to see them. 

Mr. Low tells of the day at Manasquan 
when word was received from Mrs. Steven- 
son that she had found a schooner-yacht 
satisfactory for the voyage. 

An answer must be sent at once. Her 
husband telegraphed that they would come, 
but it was not without misgivings that he 
made this final decision. There was much 
at stake in an uncertain venture of the kind. 
It meant a sacrifice of comfort for his wife 
and mother, big expense, and perhaps no 
better health in the end. 
118 



SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 

However, it seemed worth the risk, and 
having decided to go he began to look for- 
ward to the trip with boyish delight. "It 
will be horrid fun," he said, "to be an invalid 
gentleman on board a yacht, to walk around 
with a spy-glass under your arm, to make 
landings and trade beads and chromos for 
cocoanuts, and to have the natives swim 
out to meet you." 

He and Lloyd spent hours laying their 
course and making out lists of stores with 
which to furnish the schooner, regardless of 
the doubt expressed by their friends as to 
the capacity of the boat. "They calmly 
proceeded with their interminable lists and 
scorned the criticism of a mere land-lubber. 
All conversation that was not of a nautical 
character failed to hold their interest." 

Cheered with strong hopes for Louis's 
future, the family departed for San Francisco 
on the 28th of May, 1888. Their one regret 
was the good friends they were leaving be- 
hind. This particularly affected Louis, but 
he tried to hide his feelings by making all 
119 



ROBERT I>OUIS STEVENSON 

sorts of lively and impossible proposals for 
their joining him later on. 

His parting words to Mr. Low were: 
"There's England over there ^ and I've left 
it — perhaps I may never go back — and 
there on the other side of this big continent 
there's another sea rolling in. I loved the 
Pacific in the days when I was at Monterey, 
and perhaps now it will love me a little. I 
am going to meet it; ever since I was a boy 
the South Seas have laid a spell upon me." 



120 



CHAPTER VIII 

IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

"Since long ago, a child at home, 
I read and longed to rise and roam. 
Where'er I went, what'er I willed, 
One promised land my fancy filled. 
Hence the long road my home I made; 
Tossed much in ships; have often laid 
Below the uncurtained sky my head. 
Rain-deluged and wind buffeted; 
And many a thousand miles I crossed. 
And corners turned — love's labor lost. 
Till, Lady, to your isle of sun 
I came, not hoping, and like one 
Snatched out of blindness, rubbed my eyes, 
And hailed my promised land with cries." 

ONCE, while Louis was a discontented 
student at the University of Edin- 
burgh, the premier of New Zealand, Mr. 
Seed, spent an evening with his father and 
talked about the South Sea Islands until the 
boy said he was "sick with desire to go 
there." 
From that time on a visit to that out-of- 
121 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

the-way corner of the earth was a cherished 
dream, and he read everything he could lay 
hands on that told about it. 

While in California, the first time, Mr. 
Virgil Williams, an artist, aroused his inter- 
est still more by the accounts of his own trip 
in the South Seas. 

Now his opportunity to see them had 
actually come. He already knew much of 
the kind of places and people they were go- 
ing among. 

Three thousand miles across the open sea 
lay the Marquesas Islands, the first group 
they hoped to visit, and it was for that port 
their schooner, the Casco, turned her head 
when she was towed out of the Golden Gate 
at dawn on the 28th of June. 

Besides the family and a servant, Valen- 
tine Roch, who had been with them since 
Bournemouth days, the party consisted of 
the skipper, Captain Otis, who was well 
acquainted with the Pacific, a crew of four 
deck-hands, and a Japanese cook. 

The Casco was a fore-and-aft schooner, 
122 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

ninety-five feet in length, of seventy tons' 
burden. "She had most graceful lines and 
with her lofty masts, white sails and decks, 
and glittering brass work, was a lovely craft 
to the eye as she sat upon the water." 

" I must try to describe the vessel that is 
to be our home for so long," Mrs. Stevenson, 
senior, wrote to her sister at Colinton. 
"From the deck you step down into the 
cockpit, which is our open air drawing room. 
It has seats all around, nicely cushioned, and 
we sit or lie there most of the day. The 
compass is there, and the wheel, so the man 
at the wheel always keeps us company. . , . 
At the bottom of the stairs on the right 
hand side is the captain's room. Straight 
ahead is the main — or after — cabin, a nice 
bright place with a skylight and four port- 
holes. There are four sofas that can be 
turned into beds if need be, and there are 
lockers under them in which our clothes are 
stored away. Above and behind each sofa 
is a berth concealed by white lace curtains 
on brass rods, and in these berths we three 
123 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

women are laid away as on shelves each 
night to sleep. 

"Opposite the entrance is a mirror let into 
the wall, with two small shelves under it. 
On each side of this is a door. The one to 
the right leads ... to Lloyd's cabin, and 
beyond that again is the forward cabin, or 
dining room. The door to the left opens 
into . . . Louis' sleeping-room. It is very 
roomy with both a bed and a sofa in it, so 
that he will be very comfortable. . . . 

"The dining room has a long table and 
chairs. Between the doors a very ugly pic- 
ture of fruit and cake. Louis would fain 
cover it up if we could spare a flag with which 
to do it. The doors at the further end lead 
to the pantry and galley and beyond these 
are the men's quarters." 

No expense had been spared in building 
the Casco to make her comfortable. She was 
intended, however, for cruising in the Cali- 
fornia waters and was hardly suited^toHiie 
rough handling she received during the 
squally weather of the next few months. 
124 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

Fortunately she stood the test well and her 
passengers suffered few discomforts. 

Once under way and settled for living, the 
trip proved quite uneventful. The long days 
were spent on deck reading or working, and 
Stevenson began to gather material for a 
book on the South Seas. The ship's life 
suited him admirably; every strange fish and 
new star interested him, and he grew stronger 
hourly in the warm air. 

"Since the fifth day," he wrote, "we were 
left behind by a full-rigged English ship . . . 
bound round the Horn, we have not spied a 
sail, nor a land bird, nor a shred of sea-weed. 
In impudent isolation, the toy schooner has 
plowed her path of snow scross the empty 
deep, far from all track of commerce, far 
from any hand of help; now to the sound of 
slatting sails and stamping sheet blocks, 
staggering in the turmoil of that business 
falsely called a calm, now, in the assault of 
squalls burying her lee-rail in the sea. . . . 
Flying fish, a skimming silver rain on the 
blue sea; a turtle fast asleep in the early 
125 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

morning sunshine; the Southern Cross hung 
thwart the forerigging lil<e the frame of a 
wrecked kite — the pole star and the familiar 
plough dropping ever lower in the wake; 
these build up thus far the history of our 
voyage. It is singular to come so far and see 
so infinitely little." 

The squalls that came very quickly, fre- 
quently broke the monotony of the trip. 
One moment the Casco would be sailing along 
easily and the "next moment, the inhabi- 
tants of the cabin were piled one upon an- 
other, the sea was pouring into the cockpit 
and spouting in fountains through forgotten 
deadlights, and the steersman stood spinning 
the wheel for his life in a halo of tropical 
rain." 

After twenty-two days at sea they sighted 
their first island, Nukahiva, one of the Mar- 
quesan group, and were all on deck before 
dawn anxiously watching for it. They not 
only looked forward eagerly to the sight of 
land again after so many days on the open 
ocean, but it was indeed an adventure to 
126 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

come to a country totally strange to all of 
them, where few white people had been be- 
fore. 

"Not one soul aboard the Casco had set 
foot upon the Islands," says Stevenson, "or 
knew except by accident one word of any of 
the island tongues; and it was with something 
perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as 
thrilled the bosom of the discoverers that 
we drew near these problematic shores. 

"Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe 
was already paddling from the hamlet. It 
contained two men: one white, one brown 
and tattooed across the face with bands of 
blue, both immaculate with white European 
clothes. . . . Canoe followed canoe till the 
ship swarmed with stalwart, six foot men in 
every stage of undress . . . the more con- 
siderable tattooed from head to foot in awful 
patterns ... all talking and we could not 
understand one word; all trying to trade 
with us who had no thought of trading, or 
offering us island curios at prices palpably 
absurd." 

127 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

All this charmed and delighted Stevenson, 
who had dreamed many times of witnessing 
just such a scene. He wrote to Cummie that 
he was living all over again many of the 
stories she had read to him and found them 
coming true about himself. 

For six weeks they cruised about among 
these islands, frequently dropping anchor and 
going ashore for several days. When the 
natives were convinced that they had neither 
come to trade or to make trouble, but were 
simply interested in them and their country, 
they made the visitors most welcome and 
showered presents of fruit, mats, baskets, 
and fans upon them. 

All were eager to visit the schooner, which 
they called Pahi Mani, meaning the shining 
or the silver ship. The chiefs tried to mea- 
sure its dimensions with their arms. The 
liveliest curiosity was shown about every- 
thing; the red velvet cushions, the looking- 
glasses, and the typewriter pleased par- 
ticularly. A photograph of Queen Victoria 
hung in the fore-cabin and was always de- 
128 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

scribed to the island callers as Vahine Haka- 
iki Beritano, which meant literally, woman- 
great-chief Britain. It was a surprise to 
find how much many of them already knew 
about her. 

Some afternoons the Casco swarmed with 
these strange visitors who were always de- 
lighted at the refreshments of ship's biscuits 
and pineapple syrup and water offered them. 
A certain chief was particularly taken with 
a pair of gloves belonging to Mrs. Stevenson, 
senior. He smelled of them, called them 
British tattooing, and insisted on her putting 
them on and off a great many times. 

The entire family fell quickly into the 
island mode of living; dressed as the white 
inhabitants did; ate all the strange kinds of 
native food; and when ashore lived in the 
native houses, which resembled bird-cages on 
stilts. The climate suited them to perfec- 
tion, and Stevenson particularly benefited by 
it, bathing daily in the warm surf and taking 
long walks along the beach in search of 
strange shells. 

129 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

"Here we are," his mother wrote to Cum- 
mie, "in a little bay surrounded by green 
mountains, on which sheep are grazing, and 
there are birds very like our own 'blackies' 
singing in the trees. If it were not for the 
groves of cocoa-nut palms, we might almost 
fancy ourselves in our own dear land. But 
the climate here is simply perfect. Of course 
it is hot, but there are always fresh breezes. 
. . . We have our principal meal at twelve 
o'clock, and spend the after part of the day 
on shore . . . bathing, gathering shells, knit- 
ting, or reading. Our Japanese cook and 
steward just sets out the table with cold 
meats, fruit, and cake so that we can take 
our other meal at any time in the evening 
that suits us. 

"Fanny and I are dressed like natives, in 
two garments. As we have to wade to and 
from the boat in landing and coming back, 
we discard stockings, and on the sands we 
usually go barefoot entirely. Louis wears 
only a shirt and trousers with the legs and 
arms rolled up as far as they will go, and he 
is always barefooted. You will therefore 
130 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

not be surprised to hear that we are all as 
red as lobsters. It is a strange irresponsible 
half savage life, and I sometimes wonder if 
we shall ever be able to return to civilized 
habits again. 

"The natives are very simple and kindly 
people. The Roman Catholic priests have 
persuaded them to give up their constant 
wars and the practice of cannibalism, though 
only within recent years. . . . 

"Louis has learned a good many words of 
the language, and with the help of signs can 
contrive to carry on a conversation, but I 
have stuck fast with two words: 'ka-oha' 
which means 'How do you do?' 'thank you,' 
and 'good bye,' and I am not quite sure how 
much else, and 'Mitai,' meaning good, nice, 
pretty, kind. I don't expect to get beyond 
these, but it is wonderful how much one can 
express with them. . . . 

"The natives have got names for us all. 
Louis was at first 'the old man,' much to his 
distress; but now they call him 'Ona' mean- 
ing owner of the yacht, a name he greatly 
prefers to the first. Fanny is Vahine, or 
131 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

wife; I am the old woman, and Lloyd rejoices 
in the name of Mate Karahi, the young man 
with glass eyes (spectacles). Perhaps it is 
a compliment here to be called old, as it is 
in China, at any rate, one native told Louis 
that he himself was old, but his mother was 
not! . . . 

"A native dance was got up for our bene- 
fit. None of the dancing-women appeared, 
but five men dressed in shirt and trousers, 
danced together with spirit and grace. The 
music was provided by a drum, made out of 
an old tin box. Many of the steps reminded 
me of a Highland reel, but were curiously 
mixed up with calisthenic, and even gym- 
nastic exercises; the hands in particular were 
used very gracefully, and they often took 
off their hats and waved them to and fro. 
But they also climbed on each other's 
shoulders, and did other strange things. 
After dancing for some time, they sang 
songs to us in a curious, low, weird kind of 
crooning. Altogether it was a strange sort 
of afternoon party!" 

132 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

The Marquesas Islands belong to the 
French, and the commandant in charge was 
most cordial to Stevenson, inviting him to 
his house frequently during his stay in the 
islands. When at the expiration of six 
weeks it was time for the Casco to weigh 
anchor and the party sailed on to explore 
still farther, they left behind them many 
friends who regretted their departure. Here 
as elsewhere in the South Seas, Stevenson 
showed his sympathy and kindliness toward 
the island people regardless of who they 
were or their rank. White or half-caste 
priest, missionary, or trader, all were treated 
the same. No bribe, he said, would induce 
him to call the natives savages. 

Mr. Johnstone, an English resident in the 
South Seas at the time of Stevenson's visit, 
says: "His inborn courtesy more than any 
of his other good traits, endeared him to his 
fellows in the Pacific ... in the hearts of 
our Island people he built a monument more 
lasting than stone or brass." 

The recollection of the history of his own 
133 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

wild Scottish Islands, the people and con- 
ditions his grandfather found among them, 
helped him to understand these people and 
account for many of their actions. Though 
at opposite ends of the earth, many of their 
customs and legends corresponded. The 
dwellers in the Hebrides in the old days 
likewise lived in clans with their chief and 
struggled to retain their independence against 
an invading power. 

Tahiti, one of the group of Society Islands, 
was their next stopping place. Before start- 
ing a new mate was shipped, who was more 
familiar with the course, which lay through 
the Dangerous Archipelago — a group of low, 
badly lighted islands. 

The Society Islands are most beautiful, 
Tahiti probably the gem of them all, but on 
arriving Stevenson was in no condition to 
appreciate their loveliness. A cold contracted 
on the trip made him quite ill. The trip had 
proved very dangerous even with the aid of 
a pilot, and twice they gave themselves up 
for lost when they were becalmed and 
134 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

drifted in toward the shore. "The reefs 
were close in," wrote Stevenson, "with my 
eye! What a surf! The pilot thought we 
were gone and the captain had a boat cleared, 
when a lucky squall came to our rescue." 

After landing his condition became so 
much worse his wife grew desperate and 
determined to find a comfortable spot for 
him. After much trouble a Chinaman with 
a team was secured, who agreed to drive the 
entire family to Tautira, the largest village, 
sixteen miles away over a road crossed by 
no less than twenty-one streams. On this 
uncertain venture they started, with the head 
of the family in a state of collapse, know- 
ing nothing of the village they were going to 
or the living it would afford them. 

None of them ever regretted the persever- 
ance which led them on, however, for in all 
their wanderings in the South Seas before 
or after no place ever charmed them more, 
or were they received with greater hospital- 
ity than in Tautira. 

The day after their arrival, Moe, an is- 
135 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

land princess and an ex-queen, visited them. 
When she found Stevenson ill she insisted 
he and his family be moved to her own 
house where they could have more comforts. 
The house at the time was occupied by Ori, 
a subchief, a subject and relative of the 
princess. But he and his family gladly 
turned out to make room for the visitors and 
lived in a tiny house near by. 

"Ori is the very finest specimen of native 
we have seen yet," wrote Mrs. Stevenson. 
"He is several inches over six feet, of perfect 
though almost gigantic proportions." 

As soon as her husband was strong enough 
to be about again he and Ori became great 
friends. Finally, according to an island cus- 
tom, Stevenson was adopted into Ori's clan 
and became his brother. This likewise meant 
exchanging names and Ori became Rui, the 
nearest possible approach to Louis since there 
is no L or S in the Tahitian language. Louis 
in turn became Terii-Tera (pronounced Te- 
r^^terah), which was Ori's Christian name, 
Ori standing merely for his clan title. 
136 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

To show their gratitude for the hospital- 
ity shown them by Ori and the people of the 
village, Stevenson decided to give a public 
feast. 

The feast day was set for Wednesday, and 
the previous Sunday a chief issued the in- 
vitations from the Farehau, a house resem- 
bling an enormous bird-cage in the centre of 
the village, from which all the news was read 
aloud to the people once a week. 

A feast of such size necessitated much 
preparation. 

"The chief, who was our guide in the 
matter," wrote Mrs. Stevenson, "found four 
large fat hogs, which Louis bought, and four 
cases of ship's biscuit were sent over from the 
Casco, which is lying at Papeete for repairs. 
. . . Our hogs were killed in the morning, 
washed in the sea, and roasted whole in a 
pit with hot stones. When done they were 
laid on their stomachs in neat open coffins of 
green basket work, each hog with his case of 
biscuits beside him. Early in the morning 
the entire population began bathing, a bath 
137 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

being the preliminary to everything. At 
about three o'clock — four was the hour set 
— there was a general movement toward our 
premises, so that I had to hurry Louis into 
his clothes, all white even to his shoes. 
Lloyd was also in white, but barefoot. . . . 
The chief, who speaks French very well, 
stood beside Louis to interpret for him. By 
the time we had taken our respective places 
on the veranda in front of our door, an im- 
mense crowd had assembled. They came in 
five detachments. . . . Each set of people 
came bending under the weight of bamboo 
poles laden with fruits, figs, fowls, etc. All 
were dressed in their gayest and many had 
wreaths of leaves or flowers on their heads. 
The prettiest sight of all was the children, 
who came marching two and two abreast, 
the bamboo poles lying lengthwise across 
their shoulders. 

"When all the offerings had been piled in 

five great heaps upon the ground, Louis 

made his oration to the accompaniment of 

the squealing of pigs, the cackling of hens, 

138 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

and the roar of the surf. ... A speech was 
made in return on behalf of the village. . . . 
Each speaker finished by coming forward 
with one of the smaller things in his hand, 
which he offered personally to Louis, and 
then shook hands with us all and retired. 
Among these smaller presents were many 
fish-hooks for large fishing, laboriously carved 
from mother-of-pearl shell. One man came 
with one egg in each hand saying 'carry 
these to Scotland with you, let them hatch 
into cocks, and their song shall remind you 
of Tautira.' The schoolmaster, with a leaf- 
basket of rose apples, made his speech in 
French." 

While overhauling the Casco two or three 
days before they planned to leave Tautira, 
Captain Otis was shocked to find the whole 
upper half of the main masthead completely 
eaten out by dry-rot. This necessitated tak- 
ing the schooner around to Papeete, on the 
other side of the island, for repairs. Under 
ordinary circumstances the setting of a new 
masthead need to have delayed them but a 
139 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

few days; in the South Seas, however, it 
was a different matter. Only after searching 
for days in Papeete was he able to find a 
man who knew anything of ship-carpenter- 
ing, and when found he worked according to 
his own sweet will. So it was five weeks 
before the Casco was ready to return for her 
passengers, who in the meantime were in a 
state of anxiety as to her whereabouts. 

During their enforced stay Ori treated the 
entire family like a brother indeed, doing 
everything in his power to make their visit 
pleasant. 

At last, on Christmas Day, they were ready 
to depart. The entire population of Tautira 
came to the beach to bid them farewell, and 
as the Casco swung out of the harbor one of 
the French officials fired a salute of twenty- 
one guns with his army rifle and the schooner 
returned it with a heavy-tongued Win- 
chester. 

Tautira had grown to seem like a real 
home to all of them. To leave it with very 
little hope of ever returning to see such good 
140 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

friends as Princess Moe and Ori was a real 
grief, while they in their turn were quite 
heart-broken. Stevenson's friendship had 
brought something into their lives they had 
never had before. 

Honolulu was the goal of the Casco now, 
and all eagerly looked forward to the letters 
waiting for them there — the first word from 
home since leaving San Francisco. 

Bad weather attended the Casco all the 
way. They were delayed by a succession of 
hurricanes and calms until the supply of 
food ran very low and they were reduced to 
a diet of "salt-horse" and ship-biscuit. 

The last forty-eight hours of their run was 
made in the very teeth of a furious gale when 
the captain took big risks by carrying full 
sail, with the hope of making port before their 
supply of food and water was entirely ex- 
hausted. In spite of the danger, Stevenson 
enjoyed this daring run hugely. Later, when 
he and Lloyd wrote "The Wrecker" to- 
gether, this very episode figured in the story, 
Captain Otis under the name of Captain 
141 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

Nares performing a similar sail-carrying feat 
on the schooner Norah Creina. 

Mrs. Strong, Stevenson's stepdaughter, 
and her family were waiting in Honolulu 
and gave them a warm welcome. The 
travellers soon found themselves the centre 
of interest among Mrs. Strong's large circle 
of friends and it was with difficulty Steven- 
son found time to finish the last chapters of 
"The Master of Ballantrae," which he had 
been working on since leaving Saranac. 

Honolulu, with its street-cars, shops, elec- 
tric lights, and mixture of native and foreign 
population, seemed strangely crowded and 
modern after the scenes they had recently 
left; too modern by far to suit Stevenson, who 
preferred the unconventional wild life of the 
islands they had come from. 

At the Royal Palace in Honolulu, Kala- 
kaua, the last of the Hawaiian kings, still held 
court. He enjoyed R. L. S. and invited him 
often to the palace and told him the history 
and legends of many of the islands of the 
South Seas. It was from Kalakaua he first 
142 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

learned to know the troubled history of the 
Samoan Islands and of Apia, which was to 
be his future home. 

The Island of Molokai, the leper colony, 
lay not far off. While in Honolulu he spent 
several days there, in the place where Fa- 
ther Damien had lately done his splendid 
work. 

According to their original scheme they 
were to return home from Honolulu, but 
having come so far they were eager to see 
more. They had tasted the dangers and fas- 
cination of the life among the wild islands, 
each so different, and it had only whetted 
their appetites for what lay still beyond. 
The chances of coming so far again were 
slight; it seemed too good an opportunity 
to miss. So Stevenson wrote to the friends 
at home, whom he longed daily to see: 
"Yes — I own up — I am untrue to friend- 
ship and (what is less, but still considerable) 
to civilization. I am not coming home for 
another year. . . . But look here and judge 
me tenderly. I have had more fun and 
143 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

pleasure of my life these past months than 
ever before, and more health than any time 
in ten long years. . . . And this precious 
deep is filled with islands which we may still 
visit, and though the sea is a dreadful place, 
I like to be there, and like squalls (when they 
are over) and to draw near to a new island 
I can not say how much I like. . . . 

"Remember me as I was at home, and 
think of me sea-bathing and walking about, 
as jolly as a sand boy; you will own the 
temptation is strong; and as the scheme, bar 
fatal accidents, is bound to pay into the bar- 
gain, sooner or later, it seems it would be 
madness to come home now, with an imper- 
fect book . . . and perhaps fall sick again 
by autumn. 

" It is a singular thing that as I was pack- 
ing up old papers ere I left Skerryvore, I 
came on the prophecies of a drunken High- 
land sibyl, when I was sixteen. She said I 
was to be very happy, — to visit America 
and to be much upon the sea. ... I can 
not say why I like the sea . . . my poor 
144 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

grandfather it is from liim I inherit the 
taste I fancy, and he was around many 
islands in his day; but I, please God, 
shall beat him at that before the recall is 
sounded." 

So the Casco was shipped back to San 
Francisco, Mrs. Stevenson, senior, returned 
to Scotland for a visit, and the trading 
schooner Equator was chartered for a trip 
among the Marshall, Gilbert, and Samoan 
Islands. 

Just before leaving, the following letter 
came from Ori, which Stevenson says he 
would rather have received than written 
"Red Gauntlet" or the "Sixth ^neid." 

" I make you to know my great affection. 
At the hour when you left us, I was filled 
with tears; my wife Rui Telime, also, and all 
my household. When you embarked I felt 
great sorrow. It is for this that I went upon 
the road, and you looked from that ship, and 
I looked at you on the ship with great grief 
until you had raised the anchor and hoisted 
the sail. When the ship started I ran along 
145 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

the beach to see you still; and when you were 
in the open sea I cried out to you ' Farewell 
Louis,' and when I was coming back to my 
house I seemed to hear your voice crying, 
*Rui, farewell.' Afterwards I watched the 
ship as long as I could until the night fell; 
and when it was dark I said to myself: 'If 
I had wings I should fly to the ship to meet 
you.' ... I wept then . . . telling my- 
self continually, 'Teriitera returns to his own 
country and leaves his dear Rui in grief.' . . . 
I will not forget you in my memory. Here is 
the thought: I desire to meet you again. 
It is my Teriitera makes the only riches I 
desire in this world. It is your eyes that I 
desire to see again. It must be that your 
body and my body shall eat together at one 
table, there is what would make my heart 
content. But now we are separated. May 
God be with you all. May His word and 
His mercy go with you, so that you may 
be well and we also, according to the words 
of Paul. 

"Ori a Ori, that is to say, Rui." 
14G 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

"All told," said Stevenson, "if my books 
have enabled or helped me to make this 
voyage, to know Rui, and to have received 
such a letter, they have . . . not been writ 
in vain." 



147 



CHAPTER IX 
VAILIMA 

"We thank Thee for this place in which we dwell; 
for the love that unites us; for the peace accorded us 
this day; for the hope with which we expect the mor- 
row; for the health, the work, the food, and the bright 
skies that make our lives delightful; for the friends in 
all parts of the earth, and our friendly helpers in this 
foreign isle. . . . Give us courage and gaiety and the 
quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our 
enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent 
endeavors. If it may not, give us strength to encounter 
that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, 
constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in 
all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of 
death, loyal and loving one to another." R. L. S. 
— Prayer used with the household at Vailima. 

ON the 7th of December, when the fam- 
ily landed at Upolu, the chief of the 
Samoas or Samoan Islands, they little dreamed 
it was to be their home for the next four years 
and the last the master of the house was ever 
to know. 

It had been frequently borne upon Steven- 
son, however, while cruising among the Mar- 
148 



VAILIMA 

shall and Gilbert Islands during the past 
months, that a home in either England or 
Scotland again was a vain dream for him. 

"I do not ask for health," he said, "but I 
will go anywhere and live in any place 
where I can enjoy the existence of a human 
being." He seldom complained and it is 
rare to find even the brave sort of cry he 
made against fate to a friend at this time. 

"For fourteen years I have not had a 
day's real health. I have wakened sick and 
gone to bed weary, and I have done my work 
unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and 
written out of it, written in hemorrhages, 
written in sickness, written torn by cough- 
ing, written when my head swam for weak- 
ness, and for so long, it seems to me I have 
won my wager and recovered my glove. I 
am better now, have been, rightly speaking, 
since I first came to the Pacific; and still 
few are the days when I am not in some 
physical distress. And the battle goes on 
— ill or well, is a trifle; so as it goes. I was 
made for a contest, and the Powers have so 
149 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

willed that my battlefield shall be this dingy 
inglorious one of the bed and the physics 
bottle." 

Here in the tropics he might hope to live 
and work years longer — a return to a cold 
climate, he now knew, would be fatal. 

Why not turn traders? Often on starry 
nights, drifting among the low islands, he 
and Lloyd and the captain of the Equator 
had lain out on deck and planned what a 
lark it would be to buy a schooner, cruise 
among the islands, and trade with the natives. 
They would write stories, too, about these 
strange island dwellers with their many 
weird superstitions and of the white men 
who drifted from all corners of the globe to 
make their home there. 

Already Captain Reid had told them many 
such tales which Stevenson wove into stories. 
The "Beach of Falesa" and the "Isle of 
Voices" are probably the two most famous, 
while "the strange story of the loss of the 
brigantine Wandering Minstrel and what 
men and ships do in that wild and beautiful 
150 



VAILIMA 

world beyond the American continent" 
formed a plot for the story called "The 
Wrecker," which he and Lloyd Osbourne 
wrote together later on. 

Samoa was a place he was eager to visit. 
King Kalakaua at Honolulu had already 
told him much of its troubled history. The 
group of thirteen islands lay about four 
thousand two hundred miles southwest of 
San Francisco. At that time they were 
under the control of England, Germany, and 
the United States according to a treaty 
entered into in 1889. These countries ap- 
pointed a chief justice, a president of the 
municipal council, three consuls, and three 
land commissioners. A native king was 
likewise recognized on each island. 

This triple control proved most unsatis- 
factory and for years past there had been 
constant friction among the officials and 
warlike outbreaks among the natives. 

These complications interested Stevenson. 
His first idea had been to stop there but a 
short time. He now found he wanted to 
151 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

remain in Samoa long enougli to write its 
history. 

The Samoans are true Polynesians; a 
strong and handsome race whose reputation 
is high among all the people of the Pacific. 
The large majority have become Christians, 
but in spite of the influence of the mission- 
aries and the foreign powers who control 
them, they retain many of their old customs 
and habits. They are naturally peace-loving 
in spite of their many wars. Fighting does 
not appeal to them for its own sake, and they 
enjoy a good family life, treating their 
women with great respect and lavishing af- 
fection upon their children. 

Stevenson wanted those at home to know 
these people better; his sympathy, which 
was ever with the weaker side, was instantly 
aroused in behalf of the natives, and he 
wanted to tell their side of the story. 

If they were to make a home anywhere in 

the South Seas there could be no better spot 

than Apia, the principal port and capital 

of these islands, as it had a good mail service, 

152 



VAILIMA 

a most important feature to a writer. Tiie 
monthly mail-steamers between San Fran- 
cisco and Sydney, as well as other Australian 
mail-boats, stopped there. 

So he purchased four hundred acres on the 
hills three miles from Apia and preparations 
were immediately made for clearing the 
ground and building a house. Lloyd Osbourne 
left for England to bring back the household 
treasures from Skerryvore, to make a real 
home, and Stevenson and his wife lived 
gypsy fashion meanwhile in a four-room 
wooden house. 

The new home was named Vailima, which 
is Samoan for "Five Waters," there being 
five streams running through the property. 

The house was built of wood, painted dark 
green with a red roof. When finished its 
chief feature was the great hall within, 
sixty feet long, lined and ceiled with Cali- 
fornia redwood. Here among the home 
treasures — his own portrait, war dresses, 
corselets, fans, and mats presented to him 
by island kings — the marble bust of grand- 
153 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

father Stevenson smiled down with approval 
on many a motley gathering. Louis often 
wondered if they reminded the old gentleman 
of some of the strange people he had enter- 
tained years ago in Baxter Place. 

All about was dense, tropical undergrowth, 
only paths led to the house, and these must 
continually be cut out. All carrying was 
done by two big New Zealand pack-horses. 

A large garden was planted — Mrs. Steven- 
son's special hobby. Cocoanuts, oranges, 
guavas, and mangoes already grew on the 
estate. The ground was very fertile, and 
kava, the root of which is used for the Samoan 
national drink, pineapples, sweet potatoes, 
and eggplants were soon flourishing among 
other things. Limes were so plentiful that 
they formed the hedge about the place; 
citrons were so common that they rotted on 
the trees. 

All this ground-breaking, house-building, 
and gardening were new to Stevenson, and he 
revelled in them to the neglect of his writing. 

"This is a hard and interesting and beauti- 
154 



VAILIMA 

ful life we lead now," he wrote to Sidney 
Colvin. "Our place is in a deep cleft of 
Vaea Mountain; some six hundred feet above 
the sea, embowered in forest, which is our 
strangling enemy, and which we combat 
with axes and dollars. I am crazy over out- 
door work, and had at last to confine myself 
to the house, or literature must have gone 
by the board. Nothing is so interesting as 
weeding, clearing, and pathmaking; the over- 
sight of laborers becomes a disease; it is 
quite an effort not to drop into the farmer; 
and it does make you feel so well. To come 
down covered with mud and drenched with 
sweat and rain after some hours in the bush, 
change, rub down, and take a chair in the 
verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience." 

Before his arrival in Apia, Stevenson's tale 
of "The Bottle Imp" had been translated 
into Samoan by the missionaries. When the 
natives discovered he was its author they im- 
mediately named him Tusitala, The Teller- 
of-Tales. He still owned the bottle, they 
said; it was that gave him the wealth to cruise 
155 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

about in a great boat and build a fine house. 
The family often wondered why native visit- 
ors were curious to see the inside of the great 
safe in the hall at Vailima until they found 
that it was the belief among the islanders 
that the safe was the bottle's hiding-place. 

Mrs. Stevenson, senior, returned with 
Lloyd from England, and later Mrs. Strong 
and her small son, Austin, came from Hono- 
lulu to make the family complete. 

The servants were all natives, "boys" as 
they called themselves. There were usually 
about half a dozen about the house, with a 
boy for the garden and to look after the cows 
and pigs, besides a band of outside laborers, 
varying from half a dozen to thirty, under 
Lloyd's direction. 

Sosimo was Stevenson's particular boy. 
He waited upon him hand and foot, looked 
after his clothes and his pony "Jack," and 
was devoted in every way. His loyalty to 
his master lasted to the end of his own life. 

The servants were governed on something 
very like the clan system. A Vailima tartan 
156 



VAILIMA 

was adopted for special occasions and Steven- 
son encouraged tiiem to think of tiie house- 
hold as a family, to take interest and pride 
in all its doings. 

On Sunday evenings the entire household 
was assembled. A chapter of the Samoan 
Bible was read and Samoan hymns sung. 
Then a prayer in English written by Steven- 
son was read, concluding with the Lord's 
Prayer in Samoan. 

If the master had cause to be displeased 
with any one of them, they were all sum- 
moned and reprimanded or fined. 

His stories delighted them. They were 
never tired of looking at the picture of 
Skerryvore Light and hearing about the 
rugged coasts of Tusitala's native island and 
of his father and grandfather who built 
lighthouses. The latter impressed them 
greatly, since building of any kind in Samoa 
is considered a fine art. The deeds of Gen- 
eral Gordon, the Indian Mutiny, and Luck- 
now were likewise favorite tales when 
Tusitala showed them a treasure he prized 
157 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

highly: a message written by General Gor- 
don from Khartoum. It was in Arabic on a 
small piece of cigarette-paper which might 
be easily swallowed should the messenger 
be captured. Stevenson always believed it 
to be the last message sent before the great 
general's death. 

They came to him for everything and he 
was ever ready with help and advice. They 
were quick to appreciate his justice and 
kindliness, and to a man were devoted to 
him. "Once Tusitala's friend, always Tusi- 
tala's friend," they said. 

With his customary energy he threw him- 
self heart and soul for a time into the political 
troubles of the island, making himself the 
champion of the natives' cause. He wrote 
a series of letters to the papers at home 
stating his idea of the injustice shown the 
Samoans under their present government. 
It was a most delicate situation, and at times 
led to very strained relations between himself 
and the officials in Apia. 

Those at home wondered why Stevenson 
158 



VAILIMA 

tampered with island politics at all. Why 
did he not simply leave them to the powers 
in charge? 

His answer was, he had made Samoa his 
home, the Samoans were his people, and he 
could not fail to resent any injustice shown 
them. 

Lloyd Osbourne says: "He was consulted 
on every imaginable subject. . . . Gov- 
ernment chiefs and rebels consulted him 
with regard to policy; political letters were 
brought to him to read and criticise. . . . 
Parties would come to hear the latest news 
of the proposed disarming of the country, 
or to arrange a private audience with one of 
the officials; and poor war-worn chieftains, 
whose only anxiety was to join the winning 
side and who wished to consult with Tusi- 
tala as to which that might be. Mr. Steven- 
son would sigh sometimes as he saw these 
stately folks crossing the lawn in single file, 
their attendants following behind with pres- 
ents and baskets, but he never failed to meet 
or hear them." 

159 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

He aided one party of chieftains in prison, 
and to show their gratitude on regaining 
their freedom they cleared and dug a splen- 
did road leading to his house. All the labor 
and expense they bore themselves, which 
amounted to no small matter. Ala Loto 
Alofa, they called it, the Road of the Loving 
Hearts. 

Warlike outbreaks were not infrequent 
near Vailima. The woods were often full of 
scouting parties and the roll of drums could 
be heard. One day as Stevenson and Mrs. 
Strong were writing together they were in- 
terrupted by a war party crossing the lawn. 
Mrs. Strong asked: "Louis, have we a pistol 
or gun in the house that will shoot?" and he 
answered cheerfully without stopping his work: 
"No, but we have friends on both sides." 

With all their political differences he and 
the officials retained friendly feeling. He 
paid calls on them at Apia and attended 
various town gatherings, while they were 
often entertained at Vailima. 

Always hospitable, it was a delight to him 
160 



VAILIMA 

now to keep open house. Not only the chief 
justice, the consuls, the doctor, the mission- 
aries, and the traders were in the habit of 
dropping in to Vailima, but from every ship 
that docked at Apia came some visitor who 
was anxious to meet Stevenson and his 
family; from the war-ships came the officers 
and sailors. 

The bluejackets were always particularly 
welcome. Mrs. Strong tells of a party who 
came from H. M. S. Wallaroo on one Thanks- 
giving Day, when "the kitchen department 
was in great excitement over that foreign 
bird the turkey" and all was confusion. 
"But Louis kept his sailors on all the after- 
noon. He took them over the house and 
showed them ... the curiosities from the 
Islands, the big picture of Skerry vore light- 
house, ... the treasured bit of Gordon's 
handwriting from Khartoum, in Arabic let- 
ters on a cigarette paper, . . . and the li- 
brary, where the Scotchmen gathered about 
an old edition of Burns, with a portrait. 
Louis gave a volume of Underwoods (Steven- 
161 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

son's poems) with an inscription to Grant, 
the one who hailed from Edinburgh, and the 
man carried it carefully wrapped in his 
handkerchief. They went away waving their 
hats and keeping step." 

A croquet-ground and tennis-court were 
laid out, and Vailima was the scene of balls, 
dinners, and parties of all kinds. No birth- 
day or holiday, English, American, or Sa- 
moan, was allowed to pass unnoticed, and 
the natives were included in these festivities 
whenever possible. 

The first Christmas at Vailima they had 
a party for the children who had never before 
seen a Christmas tree. 

Tusitala's birthday was always a special 
event to his island friends. The feast was 
served in native style; all seated about on the 
floor. Rather large gatherings they must 
have been, to judge from Mrs. Strong's ac- 
count. "We had sixteen pigs roasted whole 
underground, three enormous fish (small 
whales, Lloyd called them), four hundred 
pounds of beef, ditto of pork, 200 heads of 
162 



VAILIMA 

taro, great bunches of bananas, native 
delicacies done up in bundles of //leaves, 800 
pineapples, many weighing fifteen pounds, 
all from Lloyd's patch. Among the presents 
for Tusitala, besides flowers and wreaths, 
were fans, native baskets . . . and cocoa- 
nut cups beautifully polished." 

On these occasions the hosts were often 
entertained with dances and songs. All the 
Samoans are great singers. They composed 
songs about everything and everybody, so 
that one could judge the standing a person 
held by the songs that were sung about him. 

Those sung at Vailima parties were usually 
written by one of the house "boys" and 
"they were danced and acted with great 
spirit. . . . Sometimes every member of the 
family would be represented . . . but the 
central figure, the heart of the song was al- 
ways Tusitala." 

It is a marvel with the many demands 
made upon him, his varied interests, and fre- 
quent visits to neighboring islands, Steven- 
son still found time to write stories, poems, 
163 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

prayers, notes of the South Sea Islands, 
Samoan history, and many, many letters. 
" It is a life that suits me but absorbs me like 
an ocean," he said. Through it all his health 
continued fairly good. He was able to take 
long tramps and rides that would have been 
physically impossible two years before. 

Mrs. Strong acted as his secretary and the 
majority of his writing now was done by dic- 
tation. "He generally makes notes early in 
the morning," she wrote, "which he elabo- 
rates as he reads them aloud ... he never 
falters for a word, but gives me the sentence 
with capital letters and all the stops as 
clearly and steadily as though he were reading 
from an unseen book." 

The two South Sea books occupied much 
of his time, but it was of his own land and 
people so far away that he had so little 
hope of ever seeing again, he loved best to 
write. 

" It is a singular thing," he wrote to James 
Barrie, "that I should live here in the South 
Seas, and yet my imagination so continually 
164 



VAILIMA 

inhabit the cold old huddle of grey hills from 
which we came." 

He finished and sent away further adven- 
tures of David Balfour and Alan Breck 
under the title of "David Balfour." "St. 
Ives" followed with its scenes laid around 
Edinburgh Castle, Swanston Cottage, and 
the Pentland Hills. In his last book, "Weir 
of Hermiston," the one he left unfinished, 
broken off in the midst of a word, he roamed 
the streets of Auld Reekie again with a hero 
very like what he had once been himself, who 
was likewise an enthusiastic member of the 
"Spec." 

Something which pleased him greatly at 
this time was the news from his friend 
Charles Baxter in Edinburgh that a com- 
plete edition of his works was to be pub- 
lished in the best possible form with a limited 
number of copies, to be called the "Edin- 
burgh Edition." 

" I suppose it was your idea to give it that 
name," Stevenson wrote, thanking him. "No 
other would have affected me in the same 
165 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

manner. . . . Could a more presumptuous 
idea have occurred to us in those days when 
we used to search our pockets for coppers, 
too often in vain, and combine forces to pro- 
duce the threepence necessary for two glasses 
of beer, than that I should be strong and well 
at the age of forty three in the island of 
Upolu, and that you should be at home 
bringing out the 'Edinburgh Edition'?" 

In spite of the many interests in his pres- 
ent life, his love for the people and the coun- 
try, the yearning for the friends far away 
grew daily. 

How he longed to have them see Vailima 
with all its beauties 1 To talk over old times 
again. Such visits were continually planned, 
but they were never realized. 

He seldom complained and those who were 
with him every day rarely found him low in 
spirits. It was into the letters to his old 
intimates that these longings crept when it 
swept over him that, though a voluntary exile 
in a pleasant place, he was an exile none the 
less, with the fate of him who wrote: 
166 



VAILIMA 

"There's a track across the deep, 
And a path across the sea, 
But for me there's nae return 
To my ain countree." 

"When the smell of the good wet earth" 
came to him it came "with a kind of High- 
land tone." A tropic shower found him in a 
"frame of mind and body that belonged to 
Scotland." And when he turned to write 
the chronicle of his grandfather's life and 
work, the beautiful words in which he de- 
scribed the old gentleman's farewell to 
"Sumbraugh and the wild crags of Skye" 
meant likewise his own farewell to those 
shores. No more was he to "see the topaz 
and ruby interchange on the summit of Bell 
Rock," no more to see "the castle on its 
hills," or the venerable city which he always 
thought of as his home. 

"Like Leyden," he wrote, "I have gone 
into a far land to die, not stayed like Burns 
to mingle in the end with Scottish soil." 

It was drawing near the close of their 
fourth year in Apia. On November 13 his 
167 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

birthday had been celebrated with the 
usual festivities, and on Thanksgiving Day 
he had given a dinner to his American friends 
— and then the end of all his wanderings and 
working came suddenly. 

"He wrote hard all that morning of the 
last day," says Lloyd Osbourne, "on his half- 
finished book Hermiston. ... In the after- 
noon the mail fell to be answered; not busi- 
ness correspondence — but replies to the 
long, kindly letters of distant friends, re- 
ceived but two days since, and still bright in 
memory. 

"At sunset he came downstairs. ... He 
was helping his wife on the verandah, and 
gaily talking, when suddenly he put both 
hands to his head, and cried out, 'What's 
that?' Then he asked quickly, 'Do I look 
strange?' Even as he did so he fell on his 
knees beside her. He was helped into the 
great hall, between his wife and body-servant, 
Sosimo, losing consciousness instantly, as he 
lay back in the arm-chair that had once been 
his grandfather's. Little time was lost in 
168 



VAILIMA 

bringing the doctors, Anderson of the man- 
of-war, and his friend Dr. Funk. They 
looked at him and shook their heads . . , 
he had passed the bounds of human skill. . . . 

"The dozen and more Samoans that formed 
part of the clan of which he was chief, sat in 
a wide semicircle on the floor, their reverent, 
troubled, sorrow-stricken faces all fixed upon 
their dying master. Some knelt on one knee 
to be instantly ready for any command that 
might be laid upon them. . . . 

"He died at ten minutes past eight on 
Monday evening the 3rd of December, in 
the forty-fifth year of his age. 

"The great Union Jack that flew over the 
house was hauled down and laid over the 
body, fit shroud for a loyal Scotsman. He 
lay in the hall which was ever his pride, 
where he had passed the gayest and most 
delightful hours of his life. ... In it were 
the treasures of his far off Scottish home. . . . 
The Samoans passed in procession beside his 
bed, kneeling and kissing his hand, each in 
turn, before taking their places for the long 
169 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

night watch beside him. No entreaty could 
induce them to retire, to rest themselves for 
the painful arduous duties of the morrow. 
It would show little love for Tusitala, they 
said, if they did not spend their last night 
beside him. Mournful and silent, they sat 
in deep dejection, poor, simple, loyal folks, 
fulfilling the duty that they owed their 
chief. 

"A messenger was dispatched to a few 
chiefs connected with the family, to announce 
the tidings and bid them assemble their men 
on the morrow for the work there was to 
do. . , . 

"The morning of the 4th of December 
broke cool and sunny. ... A meeting of 
chiefs was held to apportion the work and 
divide the men into parties. Forty were 
sent with knives and axes to cut a path up 
the steep face of the mountain, and the 
writer himself led another party to the sum- 
mit — men chosen from the immediate fam- 
ily — to dig the grave on the spot where it 
was Robert Louis Stevenson's wish that he 
170 



VAILIMA 

should lie. . . . Nothing more picturesque 
can be imagined than the ledge that forms 
the summit to Vaea, a place no wider than a 
room, and flat as a table. On either side 
the land descends precipitously; in front lies 
the vast ocean and surf -swept reefs; to the 
right and left green mountains rise. . . . 

"All the morning Samoans were arriving 
with flowers, few of these were white, for 
they have not learned our foreign custom, 
and the room glowed with the many colors. 
There were no strangers on that day, no ac- 
quaintances; those only were called who 
would deeply feel the loss. At one o'clock a 
body of powerful Samoans bore away the 
coffin, hid beneath a tattered red ensign that 
had flown above his vessel in many a remote 
corner of the South Seas. A path so steep 
and rugged taxed their strength to the ut- 
most, for not only was the journey difficult 
in itself, but extreme care was requisite to 
carry the coffin shoulder high. . . . 

"No stranger hand touched him. . . . 
Those who loved him carried him to his last 
171 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

home; even the coffin was the work of an 
old friend. The grave was dug by his own 
men." 

Tusitala had left them, and his friends in 
the South Seas had lost a faithful friend and 
companion, a wise and just master. 

His family and friends the world over had 
lost not only these but far more. His life 
had been a chivalrous one with all the best 
that chivalry stands for, "loyalty, honesty, 
generosity, courage, courtesy, and self-de- 
votion; to impute no unworthy motives and 
to bear no grudges; to bear misfortune with 
cheerfulness and without a murmur; to 
strike hard for the right and to take no mean 
advantage; to be gentle to women and kind 
to all that are weak; to be rigorous with one- 
self and very lenient to others — these . . . 
were the traits that distinguished Steven- 
son." 

"They do not make life easy as he fre- 
quently found." 

His resting-place on the crest of Vaea 
Mountain is covered by a tomb of gray 
172 



VAILIMA 

stone. On one side is inscribed in English 
the verses he had written for his own re- 
quiem: 

A ROBERT LOUIS Q 

1850 STEVENSON 1894 

"Under the wide and starry sky, 
Dig the grave and let me lie. 
Glad did I live and gladly die. 
And I laid me down with a will. 

"This be the verse you grave for me: 
Here he lies where he longed to be; 
Home is the sailor, home from the sea. 
And the hunter home from the hill." 

On the other side, written in Samoan and 
surrounded by carvings of thistles, his native 
flowers, and the hibiscus flowers, emblem of 
the South, are the words from the Bible: 

"Whither thou goest I will go, and where thou 
lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people; 
and thy God my God; where thou diest will I die, 
and there will I be buried." 

The Samoan chiefs have forbidden the use 
of firearms upon Vaea hillside, "that the 
173 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

birds may live there undisturbed, and raise 
above iiis grave tiie songs he loved so well." 

"Tusitala, the lover of children, the teller of tales, 
Giver of counsels and dreams, a wonder, a world's 

delight, 
Looks o'er the labours of men in the plain and the 

hills; and the sails 

Pass and repass on the sea that he loved, in the day 

and the night." 

— Andrew Lang. 



174 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Some Works in relation to Stevenson's 
LIFE, Written by Himself and Others 

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY 

Balfour, Graham: "Life of Robert Louis Stevenson." 
Two vols. 

Colvin, Sidney, ed. : "Letters of Robert Louis Steven- 
son," with biographical notes and an introduction 
by the editor. 

Simpson, E. Blantyre: "The Robert Louis Steven- 
son Originals." 

Strong, Mrs. Isobel: "Robert Louis Stevenson." 

Watts, Lauchlan Maclean: "Hills of Home" — with 
Pentland Essays by R. L. Stevenson. 

Watts: " Robert Louis Stevenson." 

ANCESTORS 

Stevenson, R. L.: "A Family of Engineers." 

"Thomas Stevenson" — in "Memories and Por- 
traits." 

Stevenson: "Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh" — in 
"Essays of Travel and in the Art of Writing." 

Talbot, P. A.: "Lig'Rtships and Lighthouses." Chap- 
ters relating to the building of Bell Rock and Skerry- 
vore. 

Poems by Stevenson: "To My Father." " Skerry vore." 

175 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL-DAYS 

Stevenson, R. L.: "The Manse" — in "Memories and 

Portraits." 
"Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured" — in 

"Memories and Portraits." 

"Child's Play" — in "Virginibus Puerisque." 

"The Lantern Bearers" — in "Across the Plains." 

"Child's Garden of Verses." 

THE STUDENT AND WANDERER 

Simpson, E. Blantyre: "Robert Louis Stevenson's 
Edinburgh Days." 

Stevenson, R. L.: "An Apology for Idlers" — in "Vir- 
ginibus Puerisque." 

"Crabbed Age and Youth" — in "Virginibus 

Puerisque." 

"Walking Tours" — in "Virginibus Puerisque." 

"Some College Memories" — in "Memories and 

Portraits." 

"Old Mortality" — in "Memories and Portraits." 

"A College Magazine" — in "Memories and Por- 
traits." 

"Pastoral" — in "Memories and Portraits." 

"An Old Scotch Gardener" — in "Memories and 

Portraits." 

"Books Which Have Influenced Me" — in "Later 

Essays." 

"Memories of an Islet" — in "Memories and Por- 
traits." 

"Random Memories" — in "Across the Plains." 

"Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin." 

176 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

"An Inland Voyage." 

"Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes." 

Low, Will H.: "A Chronicle of Friendships." Chap- 
ters dealing with Stevenson's days in the artists' 
colonies of Fontainebleau and Paris. 

Poems by Stevenson: "The Vagabond." 

"The Song of the Road." 

"Bright is the Ring of Words." 

"Youth and Love," II. 

"The Canoe Speaks." 

"A Camp." 

"The Country of the Camisards." 

"Our Lady of the Snows." 

"To a Gardener." 

"To Will H. Low." 

"To Andrew Lang." 

FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA 

Shipman, L. E.: "First Landing in New York" — in 

Book Buyer, vol. 13, p. 13. 
Stevenson, R. L.: "The Amateur Emigrant." 

"Across the Plains." 

"The Old Pacific Capital (Monterey)" — in 

"Across the Plains." 
"The Silverado Squatters." 

SCOTLAND AGAIN 

Gosse, Edmund: "Personal Memories of Stevenson" 

— in Century, vol. 28, p. 447. 
Osbourne, Lloyd: "Stevenson at Play" — in Scribner's 

Magazine, vol. 24, p. 709. 

177 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

Stevenson, Mrs. R. L. : Preface to Biographical edition 

of "Treasure Island." 
Stevenson, R. L.: "My First Book, 'Treasure Island'" 
— in McClure's Magazine, vol. 3, p. 283. 

"Chapter on Dreams" — in "Across the Plains." 

Stevenson, Mrs. R. L.: Preface to the Biographical 

edition of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." 
Poems by Stevenson: "Skerryvore, the Parallel." 

"Bells upon the City are Ring- 
ing in the Night." 
"I Know Not How It Is With 

You." 
"Ticonderoga — a Legend of the 

West Highlands." 
"Heather Ale — a Galloway 
Legend." 



SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 

Low, Will H.: "Chronicle of Friendships." Chapters 
relating to Stevenson's second visit to New York 
and his meeting with General Sherman and the 
sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. 

Saint-Gaudens, Augustus: "Reminiscences of Saint- 
Gaudens." Chapters dealing with Mr. Saint- 
Gaudens's recollections of Stevenson at the time he 
made his portrait. 

Stevenson, Mrs. Margaret: "Letters — From Saranac 
to the Marquesas and Beyond." 

Poems by Stevenson: "In the States." 
"Winter." 



178 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



IN THE SOUTH SEAS 

Stevenson, Mrs. Margaret: "Letters — From Saranac 

to the Marquesas and Beyond." 
Stevenson, R. L.: "In the South Seas." 
Stevenson, Mrs. R. L.: "Cruise of the Janet Nichol 

Among the South Sea Islands — a Diary." 
Stevenson, R. L.: " Beach of Falesa," " Isle of Voices," 
"Bottle Imp" — in " Island Nights' Entertainments." 

"The Wrecker." 

"The Ebb Tide." 

Letters Dealing with Pacific Voyages and Life 

in Samoa — in his collected letters edited by Sid- 
ney Colvin. 
Stevenson, Mrs. Margaret: "Letters from Samoa." 
Stevenson, R. L.: "A Foot-Note to History. Eight 

Years of Trouble in Samoa." 
Strong, Mrs. Isobel, and Osbourne, Lloyd: "Memories 

of Vailima." 
Stevenson, R. L.: "Prayers Written at Vailima." 
Poems by Stevenson: "The Song of Rahero — a Legend 
of Tahiti." 
"The Feast of Famine — Mar- 

quesan Manners." 
"To an Island Princess." 
"To Kalakaua." 
"To Princess Kaiulani." 
"The House of Tembinoka." 
"The Woodman." 
"Tropic Rain." 
"To My Wife." 
"To My Wife" (a fragment). 
179 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

Poems of Farewell: "The Morning Drum-Call on My 

Eager Ear." 
"In the Highlands, in the Country 

Places." 
"To My Old Familiars." 
"The Tropics Vanish." 
"To S. C." 
"To S. R. Crockett." 
" Evensong." 
"We Uncommiserate Pass into the 

Night." 
"I Have Trod the Upward and 

Downward Slope." 
"An End of Travel." 
"The Celestial Surgeon." 
"Home No More Home to Me, 

Whither Must I Wander?" 
"Farewell, Fair Day and Fading 

Light." 
" Requiem." 
Lang, Andrew: "Tusitala" — in "Later Collected 
Verses." 



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